The Uses of Literary History: Some Recent Titles
In recent years, traditional literary history has often been cast as a holdover from a previous age, and as an object of scrutiny because it reinforces the aesthetics, codes, and mores of the dominant class. Its very reason for being, assert its critics, is the preservation of cultural capital at the hands of the privileged few, as John Guillory (1993) has argued powerfully in Cultural Capital. Quite in contrast, a now mostly forgotten but in its time influential article published by PMLA more than fifty years ago offered a disciplinary breakdown of "what we do." (Stevenson 1952). Nearly ten of the thirty-seven pages of this professional position paper are devoted to literary history, the rest mostly to linguistics and textual editing, and only seven pages are on "literary criticism" and its "limitations." Clearly the percentages have reversed since that confident statement.
Just a few years ago, Stephen Greenblatt, the soon-to-be president of the MLA, ruminated, in another highly visible PMLA essay (2001), [End Page 297] about the current place and function of literary history within the profession. Greenblatt made his name as one of the founding members of new historicism, the Anglo-American critical movement that inherited the mantle of the French Annalistes and infused it with Birmingham-school dialectical materialism, a Foucauldian eye for networks of "social energies," and for a desire to incorporate the (mostly silent) voices of the masses. As Greenblatt famously wrote at the beginning of a key book, he "began with a desire to speak with the dead" (1988, 1).
New historicism marked a pendulum swing towards context and away from the text, the predominant mode during the previous twenty or thirty years. Up until then, the text had either been deeply decipherable to the point of being an isolatable aesthetic object, as the new critics and the structuralists had insisted, or it was deeply undecipherable, as post-structuralists like Derrida, for whom meaning is eternally postponed, claimed. But on the whole, the main attention had been on the text (and its effects), often at the expense of social and historical considerations, with notable exceptions like Lucien Goldmann and Foucault.
While new historicism retained many of the close-reading methods of its French and new critical predecessors, it marked a shift away from the study of form, linguistic strategies, and questions of textual ontology and self-reference. Instead, it shifted towards social, political, and contextual concerns. In many ways this meant a return to an older, sociological approach to literature, while at the same time using the tools of structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. Within new historicism, in the works of critics like Greenblatt and Steven Montrose, extratextual cultural productions like court documents, popular and oral culture, sociological data, ritual, religious belief, and even physical evidence, were "textualized," and could be read as another kind of intertext, and part of a legible mega-object that could fit seamlessly along with traditional historical sources but also Shakespeare, Molière, and Cervantes. In important ways new historicism and its flagship journal Representations energized the profession by opening the canon, and by inviting outside methods...
