Safeguarding the Past: “Presentist” Historicism

Abstract

AbstractThe V21 Manifesto of 2015 proposes that we revitalize Victorian Studies through the use of presentist historicism, a methodology that recognizes how “the world we inhabit bears the traces of the nineteenth century.” Presentism—once seen by some as a bug in historicism—now becomes, intriguingly, a feature. While scholars such as Dominick LaCapra and Jennifer Fleissner have also explored presentism in historicist work, the V21 Manifesto brings renewed attention to the questions and problems presentism poses. This review explores two books by members of the V21 Collective. Both interrogate vital issues in the present: Anna Kornbluh focuses on financialization and canonical Victorian and modernist texts, Susan Zieger on ephemera and affect and middlebrow texts. Both differently erudite books reinvigorate our thinking about the past. At the same time, both books avoid questions of production in the past and present. Such avoidance creates nondialectical and specialist accounts of the past’s relation to the present and enshrines and safeguards Victorian literary studies’ privileged objects of study and methodologies. Appreciative of the ways the V21 Manifesto has renewed attention to presentist historicism, the review nonetheless argues for more reflexive and contestatory accounts of the past’s relation to the present.