No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective

In fact, you'll probably hate it. You'll consider it pedantic, self-indulgent, post-modernist balderdash, which it is. You'll be offended by its "European" condescension toward anglophone intellectualism. You'll resent the arrogance of its unexplicated allusions and its provocative assumptions about what might constitute 'general knowledge'. You'll be dismayed that, even after the most attentive reading, you couldn't possibly identify Ginzburg's central theses. You'll be outraged that the man is not only smarter and more knowledgeable than you but that he insists on rubbing the fact in your weary eyes. If you manage to finish the four essays at all, you'll feel a burning compulsion to denounce this little book as the most pretentious, affected, obscurantist piece of academic self-massage you've ever read.... .... and yet it's of some value, at least if you are an armchair cultural historian. The four essays do address interesting subjects: 1) Thomas More's "Utopia" in relationship to non-English sources, especially the satires of Lucian; 2) the curious public debate among Elizabethan 'literati' about the function of rhyme in poetry, sketching a justification of rhyme as a 'national' characteristic of the rising barbarians; Sterne's bizarre novel "Tristram Shandy" as a trope upon the encyclopedic 'Dictionnaire historique" of Pierre Bayle and/or the psychology of John Locke; 4) the influence of the letters and short stories of RL Stevenson on the theories of the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Now, it is surely true that scholars of English literature and cultural history have tended to be insular. Thus, Ginzburg's title and subtitle present an appropriate agenda: "No Island is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective." I can willingly support that agenda. The probelm is that, for the vast majority of readers, Ginzburg's 'glances' are far too oblique or cross-eyed to be stimulating. Carlo Ginzburg's earlier books about witchcraft and heresy in pre-modern Italy were wonderfully readable, accessible to a general public. This book is not.