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Sir William Jones, Biblical Orientalism and Indian Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Alun David
Affiliation:
University of Oxford

Extract

For many students of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British intellectual and literary history, Sir William Jones (1746–94) has lately come to seem a figure of great significance for our understanding of the period. A notable if implicit claim for his importance is to be found in Jerome McGann's revisionist New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993); A Hymn to Na'ra'yena (1785), Jones's translation from the Sanskrit, is symbolically placed as the anthology's first item. This essay will argue that Jones's Indian scholarship will be better understood in the light of its links with contemporary developments in biblical criticism.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 For further discussion of Jones's place in McGann's anthology see Butler's, Marilyn review, London Review of Books (20 October 1994), pp. 33–4 (p. 34).Google Scholar

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9 Quoted in Mukherjee, S. N., Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 119.Google Scholar

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16 Ibid., VI, 1.

17 See for example ibid., VI, 125, 182.

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27 Ibid., IV, 235.

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29 Works, IV, 222.