Discursive Form versus the Past in Literary History

Abstract

A ENERATION of younger scholars in the United States is returning to literary history. They are reconsidering its theory, and, as they write it, they are arguing for and providing new models of what it should be, and thus they are responding anew to the imperative, voiced at the very start of modern literary history by the Schlegel brothers, that history and theory should be one. I have followed these developments with the keenest interest and sympathy, and yet, having tried to write literary history, I am unconvinced that it can be done. Hence I raise again, with reference to both the new and the traditional literary history, the very old question, Is it possible to write literary history?' Literary history is usually considered to be a mode of criticism, but it is also a mode of history. As such, its intention is to represent and organize the past of literature and to explain why the literary series developed as it did. The genre of literary history, we might remind ourselves, includes not only works on national and regional literatures, but also on particular periods, styles, themes, and forms, and on the literature of races, of women, and of political and social groups, such as classes and religions. Thus Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony, Louis O. Martz's The Poetry of Meditation, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land are all literary history. Literary history has a long history of its own that has not yet been told, but in this essay I ignore the changes that have taken place in the genre, and draw on examples from any time in the last two centuries. My hope is to observe major forms of literary history that have persisted, essentially unchanged, from the nineteenth century to now, and to assess their strengths and limitations. Whatever leads us to believe that we cannot know the past, or cannot represent it without also distorting it, tends to undermine our faith in literary history. To traditional reasons for skepticism, familiar from the nineteenth century-the likelihood of bias in