Textual Culture in the History of the Real

This essay is an effort to support the launch of the University of Stirling's Textual Culture project by historicizing it. Focusing on the project's self description, I posit a history of the real that describes how the physical became "real" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, displacing the earlier reality of the metaphysical. Textual Culture has emerged at the moment that the grip of the physical on the real is weakening, and, I argue, its success depends on recognizing that change and adapting to it. Of particular importance is the need to re-evaluate the toolbox of literary studies. After identifying the historical connection of that toolbox to the advent of the physical two hundred years ago, I query the ongoing usefulness of two tools in particular: "close reading" and "ideology".