Historical Figuration: Poetics, Historiography, and New Genre Studies1

Abstract

AbstractThis essay has four interconnected goals: 1) to reflect upon some of the major theoretical and methodological developments (since about 1950) in the fields of early modern literary studies and history vis‐à‐vis the question of historicism; 2) to address, within the context of seventeenth‐century England, inter‐relationships between poetics and historiography; 3) to examine that “interdisciplinarity” specifically in terms of the seventeenth‐century English poetic elegy; and 4) to trace (from Plato to Puttenham) and to argue for a specific theoretical aspect of that inter‐relationship, which I will call historical figuration. My argument will hinge upon these connecting points, especially the latter two. On the one hand, I will argue that an early modern paradigm shift from theocentric to increasingly secular narrative frameworks for personal and national histories contributes to a transformation in poetic genre. English poets began to formulate a new intra‐textual crisis of linguistic signification within the elegy's construction of loss and spiritual consolation as the experience of death and mourning became less theocentric and communal and more secular and individualized during the seventeenth century. This new intra‐textuality to elegiac resistance emerges gradually but consistently from approximately the 1620s onward, facilitating the genre's new articulations of consolation situated within and against historical contexts rather than projected toward a transcendental horizon. On the other hand, I will also argue that this distinctive inter‐relationship between poetics and historiography may be theorized as historical figuration, which may be linked directly to key contributions to the history of poetic theory from Plato to Puttenham. My two‐fold thesis thus attempts to engender and engage what some may see as a trans‐discursive poetics of culture. However, I would hesitate to place my argument within the new‐historicist camp, but would hope instead that this essay may contribute to the emerging, interdisciplinary sub‐field of new genre studies, which seeks to examine literary genres as manifestations of aesthetic forms and social discourses.