Abstract
As both questions and quip suggest, “literary history,” or writing the history of literature, now seems a problematic form, both unavoidable and beyond our competence. The “now” in this sentence, and the fact that all three quotations in my epigraph are from twentieth- to twenty-first-century critics, speak to the fact that the enterprise has come to seem more elusive and contested even as it has become more sophisticated and self-conscious. The late nineteenth-century certainties of Edmund Gosse, John Morley, and George Saintsbury seem positively naïve after the successive challenges of new criticism, deconstruction, structuralism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, not to mention the strong paradigms created by Harold Bloom (the anxiety of influence) and Jerome McGann (Romantic ideology). Hardly surprising, then, that the goal of a new and complete literary history, while attractive, appears unachievable. This book takes a step back from the construction of such an inclusive, teleological narrative. Instead, it concentrates on a fairly narrow slice of time, 1770 to 1820, and considers the interest within that period in the writing of histories of literary history. In the half century on which I focus, the production of “literary history” has been both understudied and misunderstood. Interest has been shut off by the standard modern assumption that for contemporaries its goal was simply the formation of a transcendent canon, a register of enduring works of “original Genius of a high order.”2
“Is literary history possible?”
(David Perkins)
“Is literary history the history of everything?”
(David Simpson)
“Literary history used to be impossible to write; lately it has become much harder.”
(Lawrence Lipking)1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); David Simpson, “Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for ‘Antiquarian’ History”, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/contemporary/simpson/simpson.html; Lawrence Lipking, “A Trout in the Milk,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 1. Additional studies that address the current status of literary history include Rethinking Literary History: a Dialogue on Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Politics and Value in English Studies: a Discipline in Crisis? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Guy and Small argue that while literary histories framed within the contexts of academic specialization consistently point to the eclipse of the genre, literary histories continue to be written and, ironically, continue to draw for their evidence on canonical works.
William Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815)”, in Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III.80.
For parallels between modern and period developments, see James Chandler, England in 1819: the Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jon Klancher, “Godwin and the Genre Reformers: On Necessity and Contingency in Romantic Narrative Theory,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–38; Ina Ferris, “Melancholy, Memory, and the ‘Narrative Situation’ of History in Post-Enlightenment Scotland,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77–93.
William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109; Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 21. For an account critical of the prominence given in St. Clair’s work to the 1774 copyright decision, see Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). H. J. Jackson sees the Donaldson v. Beckett ruling as a “crucial date for the history of publishing in Britain” partly for its breaking up of the cartels, but most importantly for its assigning of new powers, and with them new anxieties, over copyright decisions to individual authors. See, Romantic Readers: the Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 15. See also, Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
The consequences of this categorical instability in relation to history writing and the genre repositioning stimulated by its increasing focus on manners are explored in Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of History Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), in particular, pp. 257–321, “Literary History, Memoir, and the Idea of Commemoration in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain.” A characteristic example appears in William Russell’s 1779 History of Modern Europe, in which the author concludes that after “the histories of Robertson and Hume appeared, romances were no longer read. [Including the once popular “well-known names of Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Amelia”] A new taste was introduced. The lovers of mere amusement found, that real incidents, properly selected and disposed, setting aside the idea of utility, and real characters delineated with truth and force, can more strongly engage both the mind and the heart, than any fabulous narrative. This taste, which has since given birth to many other elegant historical productions, fortunately for English literature, continues to gain ground.” See, History of Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 1800), V.434–5.
S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer, in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 43.
See, for instance, Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon from the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Even the more sympathetic Jonah Siegel, while acknowledging “the heterogeneous yet consistent project that is [D’Israeli’s] literary history,” finally dismisses it as “far from what is generally called theorizing; he rather assembles examples from an ever more extensive canon of biography in literature and art.” See, Desire and Excess: the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98–9.
Ralph Cohen, “Generating Literary Histories”, in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Representing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 48.
Isaac D’Israeli, Calamities and Quarrels of Authors. A New Edition edited by his son The Earl of Beaconsfield (London: Frederick Warne and Co., no date [1881]), 231–2.
Copyright information
© 2010 April London
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
London, A. (2010). Introduction. In: Literary History Writing, 1770–1820. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283336_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283336_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32037-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28333-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)