Literary and intellectual history

Abstract

The relationship between intellectual history and literary history can be understood as reciprocal: as this chapter will demonstrate, practitioners of the history of ideas use literary texts alongside religious, scientific and philosophical writings to map the conceptual currents within an historical period, while literary critics draw on intellectual history when reconstructing the background of literary texts. However, in seeking to position texts within a history of ideas, literary critics must also confront theoretical and methodological questions about the relationship between text and context that lie at the heart of intellectual and literary history.1