The Title Justified

New Literary History has had an extraordinary run. For my own part, I am glad to acknowledge the great influence both of the journal and of its editor Ralph Cohen. His efforts to delineate the proper subject of the literary theorist and to foster it through conferences and editorial labors deserve to be recognized as strategically important to the subject. For at the 1972 Bellagio conference (and subsequently in New Literary History), he somehow assembled from both sides of the Atlantic and the iron curtain a wide diversity of theorists. In the official photograph at the Villa Serbelloni (where once Stendhal enjoyed Pliny's views), the Marxist Fredric Jameson is within arm's length of the far-from-Marxist Hans Robert Jauss. There is the Polish semiotician Jerzy Pelc, the ex-Leavisite Wallace Robson, the Swedish iconologist Göran Hermerén. Wolfgang Iser from Konstanz adumbrates his reader-response theory and Frank Kermode toys with the structuralism of Roland Barthes. Jean Starobinski is psychoanalytic and Don Hirsch makes intentionalism unexpectedly hard to get round.

That amazing week opened a whole zodiac of theory: for at least one of the participants, it was a landmark occasion. We learnt that literature was not merely to be unrolled like a carpet, but that literary history was problematic, involved with difficult enigmas such as intention, alterity, and canon. Was literary history even possible? Many of the discussions impressed me, not least those in which Roman Ingarden's abstraction of the literary artifact was brought to bear on the innocent assumptions of New Criticism, making its basis seem flimsy. And Ralph Cohen's explorations of genre led in my case, years later, to the theory I first sketched in Kinds of Literature (1982). Many contributions to New Literary History followed a similar direction, from the early volumes up to volume 34, numbers 2 and 3 (2003) on "Theorizing Genre."

From the start, a distinctive feature of New Literary History has been its openness to new movements of thought. It has explored European schools of theory in a positively heroic way. Inaugurated at a time when New Criticism was at its height—practised for its pedagogic convenience by many who were unaware of its theoretic assumptions and implications—the journal has probably done as much as any other to encourage a critique of this popular method. Subsequently, structuralism, deconstruction, and feminist theory have all been mooted. And so, too, in later decades have cultural studies and political discourses of various types (New Historicism, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism).

Freddy Bateson, the editor of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, used to say that the natural life of a literary-critical journal was usually about ten years. And when you think of it, that has been true of quite a few of them. But New Literary History has triumphantly outlived the normal span so often as to put Bateson's theory in serious doubt. Was he simply wrong? Or has New Literary History somehow morphed into a different journal? Sometimes, certainly, it has pushed the envelope of what one thinks of as "literary"—and sometimes the envelope of "history" too. But, just as I think it is becoming a journal of cultural studies, the current issue on "Play" arrives. Now I see it is still the original New Literary History, and doing justice to the "new" in its title.