Cultivating a Common Literary Heritage: British Histories of English Literature since World War II

I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better." ¹ If the German historian Jörn Rüsen recently used this line from Peanuts to characterize the hope of historians, I assume that improving the image of the literary heritage was also the hope of the British authors of traditional national literary histories, because their patriotic bent is unmistakable. Indeed, almost all literary histories are histories of the literature of a nation and largely serve patriotic ends: they want to strengthen the past in its affiliations with the present and future that are its descendants.

Moreover, there are national traditions concerning how they are written. As the title of my essay indicates, I focus on the writing of national literary histories in Britain since the end of World War II, and a fair number of new histories of "English literature" have been published during this period. This is not surprising; after all, national literary history continues to be taught, if only on a modest scale, in British schools and at most British universities, and there is continued general interest in the national tradition and heritage. Yet one may wonder at the degree of continuity in the British writing of national literary history during that period if one thinks of the many factors militating against it.

The first is the general turn in Europe away from the nationalistic stance after World War II, which, like World War I, originated in the epitome of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the assumption that there was an ontological basis for national difference—leading to biological racism, not only in Germany but, in the form of Anglo-Saxonism, in Britain as well—had fostered the collective creation and veneration of an inherent Volksgeistor spirit of a people and a nation. In the academy, including the domain of studies devoted to cultural and literary history, the turn away from nationalism fostered a heightened awareness of the commonality of the European tradition and of intercultural exchange. This is amply clear in the work of Erich Auerbach and Ernst Robert Curtius. ²

A nationalistic approach to literature was further inhibited by certain highly influential formalist paradigms of criticism that, though derived largely from European models, had been developed in the United States and were reimported into Europe during the period under discussion. The first was New Criticism, which, despite its partly British roots in the work of I. A. Richards and William Empson, was disseminated widely throughout Europe in that of René Wellek and Austin Warren. ³ The second was structuralism, in the wake of Roman Jakobson's ideas and French versions of narratology. The third was deconstruction, which spread from Yale University not only to other places in the United States but also to Europe. As all of these paradigms bracketed the links between literary texts, their authors, and the cultural and historical conditions under which they were written, there was no room to consider their position in national literary history.

Yet in Britain other factors strongly counteracted the neglect of national history and literary history. As early as 1947, when India became independent—or, at the latest in 1956, during the Suez crisis, when the British realized that they were no longer a world power—a "post-imperial melancholy" set in, ⁴ an inwardness and nostalgia that sharpened the focus on the grand achievements of the past, including the treasure house of the national literary heritage. It is telling that in 1947 Ernest Barker, author of a 1927 book on the national character that aimed to counter the pessimistic worldview of modernism, edited a compendious work titled The Character of England, with twenty-seven essays on the traditional Britishness of all aspects of national culture. ⁵ In one essay James Sutherland pointed out that "English literature has . . . been rich in men of resolutely...