Introduction: On Literature

Abstract

AbstractLiterature and history as objects of study and fields of inquiry have shaped each other in profound if asymmetrical ways. This introduction provides a brief account of how these disciplines intersect in the GAPE and the contemporary era, emphasizing concerns with expertise and amateurism that also emerge in many of the articles in this special issue. Those concerns, in turn, relate to what the articles show are literature’s pedagical functions in the GAPE and the present moment and within and beyond the classroom. As it argues, literature’s pedagogical dimensions challenge distinctions between teaching, research, and activism in the context of current debates about if and how historical and literary study should be presentist and politically committed.