Interventionist Literary Histories: Nostalgic, Pragmatic, or Utopian?

Abstract

rels of ancients and moderns), literary history as we know it appears to have grown out of eighteenth-century antiquarian interests. In its earliest form it was often simply a compendium of information about writers (of practically anything), usually in straightforward chronological order. With Friedrich Schlegel, the story goes, came the shift from this sort of vast sequence of authors to a more limited corpus (and thus canon) of literary texts.1 The nineteenth century is generally viewed as the time of the greatest achievement in this vein, and many fundamental principles of Western literary history as a discipline were established then.* It is no coincidence that the same moment in history also witnessed the rise of a new form of national cultural self-awareness. A Western literature from the start (as in the various European quar-