The Question of Literary History

ELT 36:4 1993 Joseph F. Feeney, S.J., but leaves out Feeney's published research on Hopkins as student, teacher, Jesuit, and the Highgate Hopkins obituary . In his speculations about Hopkins's sexuality, White also ignores Sulloway and Munich on his sexism; defenses of Hopkins by Dellamora, Boyle, Loomis, and Zaniello; and Martin and Dellamora on the issue of his homosexuality. Nevertheless, this biography remains indispensable to an understanding of Hopkins. There are so many new facts and anecdotes about Hopkins that a reader will have no trouble assembling a collection about his or her special interests. For example, as a student of Hopkins's Marianism, I was fascinated by White's use of the House papers: "It is likely that by this time [1865] he had a statue of Our Lady in his room, and kissed the floor in front of it every morning." Hopkins told this to Kate McCabe in Dublin in the 1880s, according to an interview by Humphry House of Mrs. K. Cullinan, apparently only now being revealed . And of course White has done a great deal of research of his own. For example, recounting Hopkins's walk to Ffynnon Fair, he points out that it was also called Mary's Well, and "was one of nearly a hundred wells dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Wales. She had been so real to the medieval Welsh that a tradition had arisen that she had come to Wales." He then describes Hopkins's visit in great detail based on his own reconstruction of the trip with Tom Dunne. When he describes the 1870 ceremony in which Hopkins took his vows, he presents us with a startling fact of more general interest which may serve as our final example: The secrecy was due to the penal clause in the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829: "in case any person shall, after the commencement of this Act, within any part of the United Kingdom, be admitted or become a Jesuit. . . . such person shall be deemed and taken to be guilty of a misdemeanour and being thereof lawfully convicted, shall be sentenced and ordered to be banished from the United Kingdom for the term of his natural life." These are a few of the fascinating facts and anecdotes that will make this biography a rich source of material for Hopkins scholars for decades. Jerome Bump ______________ University of Texas at Austin The Question of Literary History David Perkins. Zs Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. χ + 192 pp. $25.95 512 BOOK REVIEWS A YEAR BEFORE this book was published, David Perkins succinctly announced its challenge in the pages of New Literary History: A generation of younger scholars in the United States is returning to literary history. They are reconsidering its theory, and, as they write it, they are arguing for and providing new models of what it should be, and thus they are responding anew to the imperative, voiced at the very start of modern literary history by the Schlegal brothers, that history and theory should be one. I have followed these developments with the keenest interest and sympathy, and yet, having tried to write literary history, I am unconvinced that it can be done. Hence I raise again, with reference to both the new and the traditional literary history, the very old question, Is it possible to write literary history? The spectrous question Perkins raises haunted René Wellek's Theory of Literature (1949), and twenty years later provoked Ralph Cohen to publish Zs Literary History Obsolete? as a special issue of New Literary History. That old challenge takes on new resonance, however, because of the very different manner of Perkins's presentation and contextualization . Moreover, recent events bear out the timeliness of Perkins's claims. In the past year alone both PMLA (January 1992) and American Book Review (August-September 1992) have featured the theory of literary history. Perkins thus asks the question not merely with theorists of Wellek's generation, but also with Derrida's, and to the growing number of scholars who, after Jauss, regard literary history as a challenge to literary theory. Perkins's position is particularly interesting because of his own professional...