The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature (review)

The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature turns out to be more distinctive and venturesome than its bland title suggests. Given its “useful, student-friendly features such as explanatory text boxes, chapter summaries, a detailed glossary and suggestions for further reading,” as the jacket puts it, one might expect a narrative or thematic history of a fairly conventional kind. Instead, the volume offers extensive meta-historical reflection on the methodological challenges of literary history. In the words of the introduction, “readers of this volume will be given neither the history of nineteenth-century literature, nor a history,” but rather “different sorts of narrative of the period,” with attention to “the theoretical assumptions which underpin the narratives” (9). The upshot is a stimulating experiment in literary historiography, which provokes lively reflection on that enterprise in the midst of its recent renaissance (largely driven by publishers pursuing a lucrative student market). It seems less likely to address the needs of students looking for a (let alone the) history of nineteenth-century literature.

In their introduction, “What is Nineteenth-Century Literature?” Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small nicely capture the challenges of that question: the problems of boundaries, of the nature of the phenomena under scrutiny, and of the forms of explanation a history might provide. Left unaddressed, however, is the glaring parochialism of the question, which here as throughout the volume assumes that nineteenth-century literature is self-evidently that of the British Isles. To be fair, this seems less an inadvertence than an unacknowledged byproduct of the project’s framing: taking on the entire century obviates the more familiar, more specific appeal to Romantic and Victorian, while any national label (British? English?) might well prompt robust debate on the theoretical assumptions underpinning it. But the lacuna bears addressing, as one glimpse of a potential abyss of metacritical reflection. Which premises does one choose to interrogate, which to leave unexamined?

The volume is organized more like a handbook or companion than a conventional history, and as the authors promise, it is markedly disjunctive. The first chapter, “The Contexts of Nineteenth-Century Literature,” provides a deftly woven overview of economics, technology, intellectual and political life, and print culture, organized around the contrasting social orders portrayed in Middlemarch (1871–72) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), respectively. Curiously, however, nearly half the chapter is given over to “Nineteenth-Century Literary Genres” and “Themes in Nineteenth-Century Literature”—which hardly seem literary “contexts” of the same order as “technology.” Genre, moreover, figures centrally in the subsequent chapter, “Form, Style and Genre in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” which returns to methodological questions. Asking “how and why histories of style were written in the first place” (56), the authors suggestively elicit conflicting understandings of formal innovation in late-Victorian poetry derived from the competing vantages of modernist retrospect and early-Victorian prospect. Such understandings have been complicated further, they note, by the recovery of neglected achievements—particularly as that recovery tends to emphasize description of styles and genres rather than explanation of relationships between them. Their overview of fiction is largely organized by twentieth-century debates over the nature of realism, a concept they understand as authorizing “value judgments” that create a more manageable literary field or a “route-map” through the field—albeit one that, as with poetry, must accommodate a variety of eccentric achievements (15).

The historian’s challenges are thrown into especially stark relief by what Guy and Small take to be a powerfully totalizing aim in literary history. For historians of nineteenth-century poetry, they urge, the task of recovery and expansion of the canon is less pressing than the effort “to account for the totality of nineteenth-century poetic production.” On this view, the proliferation of multiple narratives “not easily compatible with each other” is a problem: “is Yeats an Irish, Decadent, or symbolist poet?” (79). I would take this...