W h y L i t er a r y P er i o d s M at t er ed
Why Liter ary Periods
Mat tered
Historical Contrast and
the Prestige of English Studies
Ted Underwood
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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Stanford University Press.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Underwood, Ted, author
Why literary periods mattered : historical contrast and the prestige of English
studies / Ted Underwood.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8047-8446-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. English literature—Periodization. 2. English literature—Study and teaching—
History. 3. English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Title
pr25.u53 2013
2013010532
820.9—dc23
Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion
isbn 978-0-8047-8844-1 (Electronic)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of
Literary Culture
vii
1
1
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790–1819
17
2
The Invention of Historical Perspective
55
3
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
81
4
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization, and a
Forgotten Challenge to It (1886–1949)
114
Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status Anxieties of
Historicism in the 1990s
136
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
157
Notes
177
Index
195
5
6
Acknowledgments
T
took a decade to write and went through major
changes, so many of the people mentioned here may not recognize their contribution to its current form.
But at various stages of composition, I relied on advice from Nancy
Armstrong, Marshall Brown, Walter Cohen, Anne Frey, Andrew Goldstone,
Lauren Goodlad, Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Bob Markley, Jan
Mieszkowski, David Suchoff, Matt Wilkens, Paul Westover, and Gillen Wood.
Emily-Jane Cohen and Adam Potkay gave particularly crucial kinds of advice
that reshaped the structure of the book. Eleanor Courtemanche listened to the
whole argument as it evolved, and reminded me of evidence I was overlooking
or suppressing.
The third chapter would have been impossible to write without assistance
from the College Archives of University College, London, and King’s College,
London; travel to those archives was supported by a William and Flora
Hewlett International Research Travel Grant. Parts of Chapter  appeared
earlier in Representations; some paragraphs in Chapter  appeared earlier in
PMLA. The ideas in Chapter  were aired first in Philosophy and Culture, edited
by Rei Terada for Romantic Praxis. Composition of the book was supported by
sabbaticals from Colby College and from the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign.
John Unsworth deserves special acknowledgment for encouraging me
to explore digital modes of literary research; without that encouragement,
his book
vii
viiiAcknowledgments
Chapter  would not exist. The collection used in Chapter  incorporates
texts from ECCO-TCP and the Brown Women Writers’ Project, as well as
a collection of two thousand nineteenth-century works that Jordan Sellers
spent a year selecting. Harriett Green helped me gain access to many of these
resources. Collaboration with Loretta Auvil and Boris Capitanu helped me
analyze them. A version of the illustration in Chapter  appeared earlier in
The Journal of Digital Humanities. Work on this portion of the project was
supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Where things digital are
concerned, I should also credit Artificial Intelligence Atlanta, a small start-up
that gave me my first programming job (in Prolog) some thirty years ago.
W h y L i t er a r y P er i o d s M at t er ed
Introduction
Historical Contrast and the Prestige of Literary Culture
H
i s to r i e s o f l i t er a r y s t u dy tend to emphasize theoretical
controversy. The subtitle of Gerald Graff’s influential Professing
Literature may be An Institutional History, but even Graff’s book is in practice
organized around methodological debate—notably the long debate between
scholars and critics.1 Institutional structures occupy a smaller place in our
model of the discipline, although some of those structures have turned out
to be more durable than any theory. One of the most durable is periodization—an organizing principle that has shaped literary study for a century and
a half. At most colleges and universities, courses that explore the literature
of a single period (ranging in length from a decade to a century or more)
remain the mainstay of the upper-division undergraduate curriculum. These
“period surveys” can be traced back to the s, and as this book will strive
to show, they embody a cultivating mission that decisively shaped vernacular literary history shortly after its emergence, predating Matthew Arnold’s
better-known intervention in the discipline. In the early twentieth century,
periodization began to organize professional development and research as
well as teaching. Graduate students were trained to specialize in a period, and
hired to teach courses in that period. By the middle of the twentieth century,
scholars were attending period conferences and publishing in period journals.
To see that other modes of professional organization are conceivable, one has
only to glance at the discipline of history itself, where the looser concept of
“area” occupies the institutional role that periods occupy in literary studies.
Areas often cover a longer span of time than a literary period would: a his1
2Introduction
torian of science, or East Asia, for instance, may regularly teach courses that
cover several centuries. But more importantly, even when historians’ areas of
specialization cover a relatively brief span of time, the temporal period tends
to be secondary to a topic or problem that defines it. A historian might identify as a scholar of “British imperialism,” for instance, where literary scholars
identify as “Victorianists” or “modernists.”
The contrast between literary studies and history may suggest that
periodization is a by-product of professional specialization. It is true that
present-day literature departments tend to have more faculty covering certain
parts of the world than departments of history do. But the imperatives
of professional specialization cannot explain the nineteenth-century
emergence of a periodized curriculum. Period surveys preceded professional
specialization by almost fifty years. They emerged in the s, in literature
departments that contained only one or two professors, who usually had to
abandon the goal of synoptic coverage in order to make room for courses
tightly focused on individual periods. Moreover, invoking specialization
would not explain why periodization has so long remained the dominant
mode of specialization in literary studies, instead of giving way to some other
mode of specialization organized around a more properly literary category,
like genre.
Periodization has endured in a discipline where almost nothing else
does, and has endured not just in broad outline but in detail. One can open
course catalogs from the late nineteenth century and find courses on “English
Romanticism” and “Elizabethan Drama” that have been offered with
essentially the same titles for a hundred and twenty years, while philology,
the history of ideas, New Criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and New
Historicism came and went.2 Of course, the content of these courses was
transformed whenever one methodology gave way to another. Different
theoretical schools have defined the purpose of literary study in fundamentally
different ways. But this is just what seems remarkable: the persistence of an
organizing grid that is able to survive repeated, sweeping transformation of
its content. Since professors have apparently felt free to change everything
about their courses except the periodizing title, one begins to suspect that the
value of literary study, in the eyes of students and of society at large, has been
durably bound up with its ability to define cultural moments and contrast
them against each other.
That is the suspicion this book explores: I will argue that an organizing
Introduction
3
principle of historical contrast has been central to the prestige of AngloAmerican literary culture since the early nineteenth century, although its
authority is now in decline. Two phrases in that sentence may need to be
unpacked. “The prestige of literary culture” encompasses claims about
literature’s cultivating influence on readers both inside and outside the
academy. Historical contrast was already becoming central to models of
literary culture in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, before
vernacular literary history had become a university subject. The phrase
“historical contrast” is deliberately chosen for a similar breadth of reference.
“Periodization” tends to evoke an academic and almost scholastic debate
about boundaries—are they real or only nominal?—which may not have
great significance. It is true that time is a continuum, and also true that it can
be useful to divide a continuum. And perhaps literary periodization is now
becoming nothing more than that sort of mathematical abstraction.
But periodization did not acquire institutional power in literary
studies for reasons of mathematical convenience. What matters more than
boundary-drawing is the broader premise that literature’s power to cultivate
readers depends on vividly particularizing and differentiating vanished eras,
contrasting them implicitly against the present as well as against each other.
It’s a premise bound up with broader assumptions about literature’s power
to mediate historical change and transmute it into community—or in other
words, with a model of literary culture. This book investigates the emergence
of that model, and then asks what might replace it if (as I would argue) the
authority of historical contrast has in recent decades been declining.
Most studies of this topic have been preoccupied with the significance
of specific period concepts, rather than the significance of contrast as such.
Much has been written, for instance, about the construction of “Gothic”
alterity, or about the logic of “uneven development” that coordinates
timelines in different parts of the world. I hope to preserve the central insights
of those studies. For instance, it is important that European historicism has
been shaped both by a peculiar relationship to classical antiquity, and by a
colonialist impulse to map other regions of the world onto a European past.3
But on the whole, I will be less interested in particular period concepts or even
systems of periodization than in the changing cultural functions of contrast
itself.
The first few chapters of this study focus on eighteenth and earlynineteenth-century Britain. Similar developments could be traced in other
4Introduction
national contexts, but I have focused on British literature both because I know
it well, and because the historical novels of Walter Scott played a central role
in popularizing a model of literary culture organized by historical contrast.
(Scott’s influence on the European novel is well known, but he also had an
influence on universities: the professors who designed the first period survey
courses, for instance, were seeking to recreate Scott’s model of historical
imagination in the classroom.) The later chapters of this study expand beyond
Britain to consider the role historical contrast played in the nineteenthcentury European novel, and in twentieth-century Anglo-American literary
education, as well as fiction and film. This expansion of scope is not, of
course, meant to suggest that other nations simply adopted a British model
of historical cultivation. Although Scott’s influence was international, other
nations were in fact already developing their own ways of valuing historical
contrast, inflected by their own histories, class structures, and definitions
of national identity. In a single volume, it is not possible to survey the full
complexity of that story even within Europe. I can only pause occasionally to
mark points of divergence. For instance, Chapter  considers why the concept
of historical “perspective” took a different shape in the United States than it
did in the United Kingdom. But even after acknowledging those differences,
many points of similarity remain, and it is possible to trace a broadly shared
trajectory in English-language literary culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Prestige of Historical Contrast, –
Awareness of historical discontinuity was not a specifically literary
invention. The larger eighteenth-century insight we call “historicism” entailed a
recognition that different ages were separated by profoundly different, perhaps
mutually incomprehensible, modes of life and thought. The contribution that
poets, novelists, and eventually critics made was to propose that literature
had a unique ability to render discontinuity imaginable and meaningful. It
achieved this not by reducing different eras to some common standard, but
by dramatizing the vertiginous gulfs between eras, and then claiming vertigo
itself as a source of meaning. This paradox has become so familiar that modern
readers may take it for granted, but looked at squarely, the strategy is an odd
one. John Keats hinted, for instance, that his encounter with Homer became all
the more sublime because ignorance of Greek forced him to snatch glimpses
through a veil of translation, allowing only a “wild surmise” about the Homeric
Introduction
5
world beyond.4 William Wordsworth suggested that London’s power over his
heart depended not on any particular memorial or “distinct remembrance,”
but on his own inability to master a bewildering “weight of ages” made up of
“shapes, and forms, and tendencies to shape / That shift and vanish, change
and interchange / Like spectres—ferment quiet and sublime.”5
I mention these passages from Keats and Wordsworth because they are
vivid, brief, and may be familiar to some readers. But romantic-era poets were
not the only writers who sought to grasp history’s authority in the negative form
of bewildering discontinuity. This strategy emerged along with historicism
itself in the eighteenth century, and became as important to novelists as it
was to poets. In the realist historical novel, historical bewilderment famously
takes the form of a protagonist’s blindness to his or her own involvement in
historical change. But this ironic depiction of historical blindness was often
bound up with an imaginative undercurrent hinting that the understanding
denied to consciousness might return in dizzying glimpses of historical
contrast, represented in the narrative (more or less playfully) as déjà vu or
ancestral memory. These undercurrents are well known in the so-called
idealist novels of George Sand, but they can also be traced in writers celebrated
for realism, like Walter Scott and Leo Tolstoy.6 As in the poetic examples from
Keats and Wordsworth, the protagonists of these novels are denied a coherent,
synoptic overview of history, but acquire instead—and paradoxically through
their very ignorance—a sense of perspective that depends on contrast.
The model of historical cultivation that emphasized discontinuity and
contrast was not limited to literature; it shaped historiography and historical
education as well. Chapter  traces some of the consequences of that model for
popular historical writing in the early nineteenth century, focusing especially
on the way the principle of contrast was bound up with ideas about the
acquisition of “historical perspective.” The metaphor of perspective implicitly
accepts that historical knowledge is limited, and proposes to orient readers
by tracing selected differential relations instead of attempting exhaustive
coverage. The limitation tacitly implied by that metaphor was literalized
visually (as single-point perspective, shading, and foreshortening) in early
nineteenth-century timelines.7
In universities, however, a strongly contrastive, periodized model of
cultivation has shaped literary study even more deeply and enduringly than
it shaped the discipline of history itself. Since this difference between literary
and historical education has persisted for many years, there are several valid
6Introduction
ways of explaining it, with different degrees of relevance to different periods.
For instance, it is fair to observe that political and social historians have spent
more time than literary critics trying to untangle causal questions, which
don’t fit easily into a contrastive framework. Moreover, as Chapter  will show,
twentieth-century literary critics embraced a contrastive, periodized model of
their discipline in part explicitly to differentiate themselves from historians.
But in the early nineteenth century, the study of literary history acquired
its contrastive orientation most immediately from literature itself. Poets
and novelists had for several decades been representing literary cultivation
specifically as the acquisition of a historical sense that enriched the present
through brief glimpses of an alien past. The best-selling author of the era—
Walter Scott—was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized
historical moments in intimate social detail, and the English professors who
introduced period survey courses to universities in the s modeled their new
courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment. Chapter  traces this connection,
focusing particularly on Frederick Denison Maurice, who has a number of
well-known achievements (helping to found Queen’s College, for instance,
and Christian Socialism), but has so far received little or no credit for his most
decisive contribution to literary study. Maurice designed the first period survey
courses at King’s College, London. The purpose of the new courses was to give
present-day students an empathic connection to some particular moment of
the national past—or as he put it, to “bring the townsman of one age to feel
himself connected with the townsman of another.”8
“Townsman,” here, is the English equivalent of “bourgeois,” and Maurice’s
plan for periodized literary education was specifically addressed to the English
middle classes. He argued that studying discrete moments of the national past
would give the middle classes a sense of national pride equivalent to aristocratic
inheritance. This plan would be fascinating on intellectual grounds alone.
Since it actually led to the creation of a curricular institution that continues
to organize present-day departments of English, it is an understatement to
say that it deserves to be more widely discussed. Even the few words I’ve said
about Maurice above make clear, I hope, that periodization is bound up in his
thought with a complex set of ideas about class and nationality. But the story
has several further twists. Maurice was an Anglican theologian as well as a
literary historian, and there was a clear parallel between the educational value
he attributed to discrete historical periods and an unconventional theory of
immortality he advanced that made eternal life depend on the timelessness
Introduction
7
of individual moments of experience. To cap the story off, this theory of
immortality was branded a heresy by conservative Anglicans, and led to his
dismissal from King’s College.
In Chapter , I’ll have more to say about the particular philological,
religious, and political motives that converged in Maurice’s work. Here I only
want to pause to underline two aspects of his thought that typify the broader
social significance of historical contrast in the early nineteenth century: his
suggestion that periodized contrast might provide a middle-class alternative
to aristocratic distinction, and his implicit analogy between periodization
and immortality.
Emphasis on historical discontinuity has shaped the humanities so
strongly that our accounts of this theme tend to be strongly normative, pitting
the universalizing Enlightenment against romantic historicists who finally
discover that different ages understand the world in different ways.9 Without
denying the validity of historicist insights, I want to complicate normative
accounts of this transition by emphasizing that the “discovery” of historical
contrast was also socially motivated. Edmund Burke was by no means the first
person to realize that the authority of the aristocracy was bound up with their
claim to represent historical continuity. As Wolfram Schmidgen has argued,
landed property conferred authority in part because the manorial estate was
thought to embody collective continuity, and was in fact legally defined as a
product of continuity over time.10 If different periods had incommensurable
assumptions that made sense only for a given time, then the concept of
continuity would be a mirage, and no title or moss-grown manor could claim
to embody the collective past. In this sense, the periodized, contrastive model
of history that emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century can be
understood as a tacit attack on the logic of aristocratic distinction.
Just as importantly, historical contrast advanced an alternative model
of distinction. Cultural prestige had been in the early eighteenth century
imperfectly distinguished from other forms of social status: the cultural value
of a literary work could often be judged by the same standards of correctness
and polish that governed, say, elocution or manners. The late eighteenthcentury attack on “classicism” addressed this, as Trevor Ross has observed,
by attempting to define autonomous standards of specifically cultural value.11
Moreover, to ensure that culture would remain autonomous, critics defined
conformity to prevailing social standards as a positive flaw. The sources of
social prestige were thus disqualified, at least in principle, from exercising a
8Introduction
monopoly over cultural prestige. For instance, Alexander Pope could never
stand in the first rank of English writers, according to Joseph Warton, because
he “stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners because they are
familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished are, in their very nature, unfit for
any lofty effort of the Muse.”12 This remark may pose as an attack on the
manners that happen to prevail at the time of composition—as if to say,
“manners have become so uniform lately!” But an objection to the uniformity
of contemporary topics is, in practice, an objection to contemporaneity as
such. To describe varied, unfamiliar manners, poets would have to range
across varied, unfamiliar eras. Warton affirms poetry’s autonomy from
contemporary social standards, in other words, by insisting that the proper
subject of poetry is historical difference.
This strategy is a recurring theme in late-eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century literature, and I’ll argue that it was the primary reason
why historical contrast became central to the period’s definition of culture.
Disorienting visions of a remote past became paradigmatic instances of
literary imagination because they illustrated, better than any other subject
could, that literary prestige was distinct from the traditional sources of
social prestige. Of course, Charlotte Smith’s visions on Beachy Head, or
William Wordsworth’s on Salisbury Plain, could be said to invoke “tradition”
inasmuch as they use fragmentary glimpses of the past to elicit reverential
feelings toward history itself. But if this is a tradition, it is one that cannot
be transmitted or inherited.13 In fact, the reverential feeling that gives it
power is bound up with a disorienting failure of continuity—a trick that
would eventually allow a lower-middle-class writer like Keats to appropriate
Hellenic glory by insisting that he cannot read Greek and is made despairingly
dizzy by the Elgin Marbles.14 Compared to a twenty-first-century model of
cultural authority that emphasizes the up-to-date as such, this may appear
conservative. But in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context, defining
cultural authority around historical discontinuity advanced the interests of
middle-class intellectuals. The authority of the collective past could now be
appropriated in a negative way, by articulating your own distance from it.
The social implications of this gesture may be disguised by the spiritual
imagery that surrounds it in nineteenth-century literature, where historical
contrast is often dramatized as visionary disorientation, or déjà vu, or even
as a troubling past-life memory. This is not the rhetoric one ordinarily
associates with middle-class self-assertion. But the political character of this
Introduction
9
spiritualism begins to make sense if we approach the concept of immortality
from a Durkheimian perspective. For Emile Durkheim, religion was a way of
grappling with the social dimension of human existence—a dimension that
can never adequately be externalized as a “relationship” between individual
and society, since collective feelings are always present within us, and are
indeed among our first, most personal, and most powerful emotions. Thus
people are led to imagine society “in the form of a moral power that, while
immanent in us, also represents something in us that is other than ourselves.”15
The idea of the soul acknowledges this internalization of collective life; to
claim an immortal soul, for Durkheim, is in effect to claim the perpetuity of
collective life as a personal possession.
On this account, it becomes a little easier to understand why a struggle to
redefine the authority of tradition might take the form of visionary speculation
about new forms of immortality. I would argue that the nineteenth-century
discourse of historical spiritualism was at once a struggle between social
classes and a genuinely religious meditation. Historicism unsettled existing
assumptions about the perpetuity of collective life, and thus challenged
immortality at its very root. Of course, skeptical questions had always been
posed both about heaven and about the earthly immortality of fame—but
these forms of skepticism could never uproot the sentiment of immortality,
since individual afterlives are merely ways of imagining, and personalizing,
the deeper persistence of community itself. One could acknowledge that
the “gilded monuments / Of princes” are “besmeared with sluttish time”
without losing that deeper sense of continuity.16 Historicism posed a more
fundamental challenge, by demonstrating that all communities eventually
become unrecognizable to themselves. James Macpherson’s illiterate Celtic
heroes are perfectly (and anachronistically) clear-eyed on this subject. “We
shall pass away like a dream,” his king Fingal admits. “No sound will be in
the fields of our battles. Our tombs will be lost in the heath. The hunter shall
not know the place of our rest.”17 Fingal envisions the loss not of an individual
monument but of the collective context that gave it meaning. But these
pagan warriors somehow absorb enough of their author’s eighteenth-century
historicism to look forward to haunting the future as ghostly otherness—as
“the race that are no more” and “the song of other years” (, ). Implicit in
this plan is an acknowledgment that the past lives on, not through continuous
tradition, but through the social changes that transform it into something
memorably dated.
10Introduction
This is to be sure an odd vision of immortality—one that locates collective
permanence not in a church, in posterity, or in a vector of progress, but rather
in moments of mutual incomprehension that would appear to undermine
all permanence. It may be difficult to believe that a faith of this paradoxical
kind could be felt deeply enough to deserve comparison to ordinary heavenly
immortality. To address this doubt I’m inclined simply to quote Walter Pater’s
justifiably famous description of the Mona Lisa:
All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there
. . . the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle
age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan
world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she
sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets
of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about
her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was
the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all
this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the
delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the
eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten
thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived
the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes
of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the
old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.18
Lady Lisa seems to become immortal through aesthetic cultivation: her
weary familiarity with different times and places somehow makes her one
with the perpetuity of human civilization itself. But how does that happen?
What does it mean to “sweep” together different modes of life or “sum” them
up in oneself? We might suppose that it involves a dialectic, or progress, but
that’s a supposition without a great deal of support in Pater’s imagery, or in
the anaphoric structure of his long sentences, which emphasize instead sheer
diversity of experience. Lady Lisa resembles the Paterian aesthete who seeks
“to define beauty, not in the abstract but in the most concrete terms possible,
to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most
adequately this or that special manifestation of it” (vii–viii). In other words,
she seems to mine immortality somehow from the specific contrasts between
Greece and Rome, between “the mysticism of the middle age” and “the sins
of the Borgias.” In this respect, I would suggest, she is a typical instance of
the way nineteenth-century writers, and professors of literature, turned
Introduction
11
historical contrast itself into a substitute for older models of immortality (and
community) that had been undermined by historicism.
This is not an argument about secularization. I would not argue that this
new model of immortality, founded on contrast, was inherently either more
or less religious than an older model of immortality expressed in terms of,
say, fame or tradition. The change this book traces runs perpendicular to
the religious/secular axis: it involves a shift from a model of collective time
premised on continuity, to one that dramatized the collective dimension of
time by dramatizing discontinuity and multiplicity. Since “discontinuity”
sounds less reassuring than “continuity,” it might seem as though this shift
would necessarily have demystifying, secularizing implications. But that
would be a misguided assumption. In the nineteenth century, challenges
to historical continuity led not only to the emergence of a periodized
literary curriculum, but, for instance, to the emergence of dispensational
fundamentalism—a religious movement that departed from older exegetical
traditions by arguing that Scripture was radically heterogenous. Since God
had made different promises to different periods, the millennial promises
made to Israel could no longer be conflated (as Christian tradition had long
assumed) with later promises to the Christian Church. As I have argued at
length elsewhere, these fundamentalists advanced exegetical premises that
have a fair claim to be called historicist.19 But in the case of dispensational
fundamentalism, historicist emphasis on discontinuity did not lead to any
kind of secularization. It led instead to deep suspicion of secular civil society,
and to the modern doctrine of a pre-tribulational Rapture (which served in
effect as an alternate Christian apocalypse once the earthly millennium had
been returned to the Jews). This is a fascinating story in its own right, but
I mention it here simply to illustrate that there is nothing about the idea of
historical discontinuity that inherently disrupts orthodoxy. In the nineteenth
century it did give middle-class intellectuals an alternative to the logic of
collective inheritance that had supported aristocratic prestige, but that effect
needs to be understood as a specific and narrowly targeted one.
The Prestige of Periodized Contrast, –
The first three chapters of this book try to understand how the prestige
of literary culture became increasingly dependent on historical contrast in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through historical contrast, writers
12Introduction
defined a sense of collective permanence that could coexist with the radical
transformations envisioned by historicism; at the same time, they advanced
a model of cultural distinction that thrived on discontinuity and seemed
independent of inherited status. In the second half of the nineteenth century
and the first half of the twentieth, this model of culture was institutionalized
in education, as a periodized curriculum came to dominate vernacular
literary study in colleges and universities. The final three chapters of this
book ask why that model of literary culture endured so long, and why it may
have finally begun to lose its authority.
In Chapter , I investigate the curious stability of the periodized
curriculum. The range of works taught in universities certainly expanded
in the twentieth century, but the organizing principles of nationality and
period remained remarkably unshaken through a long series of controversies
about the purpose of literary education. Stability of this kind hints at some
underlying social function that endured while intellectual rationales changed
around it. But the social pressures that shaped literary historicism in the
nineteenth century—for instance, a tension between aristocratic and middleclass conceptions of tradition—can hardly also have sustained it through the
twentieth.
To better understand the durability of the periodized curriculum, I explore
one of the most effective challenges to periodization, all the more interesting
since it is now largely forgotten—the ambitious project of comparative
literature in America between  and . Today, the comparisons implied
by “comparative” literature are usually synchronic and international. So
we might expect this project to have challenged nationalism rather than
periodization. But before , comparative literature differed from traditional
literary study not just in its international scope but in its very purpose. Instead
of characterizing individual works or movements, comparatists sought to
produce a general anthropological theory of literary development. This could
have implied a fundamentally different approach to literary education, and
the seeds of a new approach are evident in early-twentieth-century course
catalogs, which began to reframe period surveys as studies of “development”
and “transition.” But this challenge to periodization proved short-lived, and
the reasons for its failure are illuminating.
In the s and s, resistance to the new disciplinary model was
expressed vaguely as a suspicion that fact-mongering comparative literary
historians were neglecting literature’s cultivating power. The rationale for
Introduction
13
this suspicion was later articulated more clearly by René Wellek, who argued
that representing literary history as a causal, continuous process could
undermine the cultural authority of literature by assimilating it to social
history. Division into discrete periods ensured the autonomy of literary
study because it prevented literature from becoming an object of merely
causal investigation. Wellek was of course just one (influential) voice in a
heterogenous discipline. There were other scholars who remained committed
to interdisciplinary connections and to causal explanation. But the salient
fact about twentieth-century curricular history is that a wide range of
heterodoxies flourished intellectually without having much enduring effect
on the structure of the curriculum. Wellek’s disciplinary argument helps
explain why. From the s through the end of the century, period concepts
seemed intellectually debatable but practically indispensable for the identity
of the discipline. In situations of that kind, “practically indispensable” tends
to carry the day.
Although periodization still organizes literature departments
institutionally, it may no longer seem to have important intellectual
consequences. Certainly, if we expect scholars to hold forth confidently
about “the animating spirit of each age” or “the essential qualities which
differentiate one period from another”—as Reuben P. Halleck did in —
we will be disappointed.20 But the degree of change could be overstated. For
one thing, the tone of pedagogy has changed less than the tone of scholarship:
the introductions to anthologies are still devoted to articulating “the
essential qualities which differentiate one period from another.” Moreover,
it is not necessary to prove that the boundaries and character of each period
can be positively defined in order to affirm the importance of periodized
contrast. It is only necessary to show that attempts to trace general laws or
long developmental arcs are doomed to failure. That negative premise has
remained an absolutely central theme of literary scholarship, shared by a range
of different theoretical schools. One can discern it, for instance, in Michel
Foucault’s critique of “continuous history.”21 It is not hard to understand
why Foucault’s attempt to replace the tracing of causes with a “genealogy”
that thrives on rupture was received more eagerly in literary studies than
in his home discipline. Foucault’s critique of continuity dovetailed neatly
with literary historians’ long-established preference for contrast. The same
preference can be traced in theories that seem remote from Foucault: for
instance, in Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, which similarly sidelined
14Introduction
sequence and causality in order to reimagine influence as a contrastive,
agonistic structure.
In short, the authority of historical discontinuity has not declined
notably inside literature departments. It remains important not only in the
institutional form of periodization, but in the negative form of an assumption
that theories premised on continuous change are somehow tame, conservative,
or recuperative. Where the discipline of literary studies itself is concerned,
this assumption neatly reverses the actual social logic of historicism. The
prestige of the discipline has long depended on the ruptures that separate
periods and movements; literary critics’ collective habit of talking about
“rupture” and “fragmentation” as if they still posed a thrilling challenge to
literary culture is at this point (collectively) disingenuous. This failure of selfunderstanding has been particularly visible in critical conversation about
postmodern historicity. When critics suggest that postmodernism is reducing
history to “heaps of fragments,” they rarely seem very genuinely troubled by
the possibility.22
In Chapter , I’ll argue that the prestige of literary culture has been
threatened in recent decades not by fragmentation, but by an assumption
that prevailing modes of (liberal, capitalist) social organization represent
an inevitable, more-or-less stable culmination of human history. That is not
an assumption supported by any evidence, but it matters less as a factual
claim than as a tacit premise of popular historical consciousness. Against
that backdrop, literary discussions of fragmentation feel more wistful than
anxious; they express nostalgia for an era when the contrasts between cultural
movements and periods could still seem to dramatize real, competing social
alternatives. This nostalgia surrounding discontinuity became particularly
visible in the conceit of “parallel lives” that characterized plays, novels,
and films of the late s and s (perhaps most famously, A. S. Byatt’s
Possession). In this subgenre, threats to humanistic culture turn into fantasies
specifically about historical discontinuity, which is both threatened by
and rescued by the eerie parallel between historically distinct layers of the
narrative.
The analysis of recent literature, film, and cultural theory in Chapter 
suggests that the waning prestige of historical contrast may be one important
source of the crisis of confidence that has troubled literary studies for roughly
a quarter-century. For literary scholars, the value of historical contrast is still
a fundamental intellectual premise, as well as a primary mode of disciplinary
Introduction
15
organization. But outside the academy, it is no longer clear that students need
to be taught to recognize periods or differentiate artistic movements from
each other.
This crisis is commonly interpreted as a consequence of the waning
prestige of literature in an age of digital media—and there may be some truth
to that interpretation. But writing has experienced radical shifts of form and
medium before. When poetry seemed to be displaced by the novel, or Greek
and Latin by vernacular literature, the shift prompted passionate debate about
the course of literary history, making literary questions only more central to
public life. If cultural history itself now seems to be losing value, it may be
because the present crisis involves not merely a transformation of media,
but a change in the structure of historical cultivation. Perhaps René Wellek
was right to imagine that the boundary between cultural and social history
depended on a distinctively cultural approach to the problem of change—a
rhetoric of contrast that gave great works and artistic movements not only
an explanatory function but a permanent exemplary value. That approach to
cultural history has been undermined on several levels—in the academy by
social materialism, and in popular consciousness by a confident presentism
that reduces the past to retro style.
Nothing I have said above implies that literature departments will stop
teaching period survey courses—or that they should. Although this book
explores the institutional history behind literary historicism, it doesn’t aim
to reduce historicist ideas to mere symptoms. Ideas can be at once socially
constructed and valid. In this case, it is after all true that human societies
differ radically from each other. Period concepts may no longer convey the
cultural authority they once did, but students still need to discover how
thoroughly historical differences can reshape the experienced world. Given
that pedagogical end, contrast is an appropriate means, and contrast probably
implies some system of chronological boundaries. So I see no reason to
assume that literary periods themselves will disappear.
On the other hand, any institution that persists for more than a hundred
years necessarily produces a few blind spots. If the cultural authority of
periodization is now waning, that poses a challenge for the humanities—but
perhaps also an opportunity to take a fresh look at old questions. The final
chapter of this volume argues that literary studies’ long reliance on a rhetoric
of contrast has in fact left the discipline with blind spots that scholars are now
free to address. I focus on initiatives associated with the rubric of “digital
16Introduction
humanities.” The introduction of quantitative methods in literary history is
controversial for a host of reasons, but I would argue that it matters above
all because it opens up new ways of characterizing gradual change, and
thereby makes it possible to write a literary history that is no longer bound
to a differentiating taxonomy of authors, periods, and movements. Critics of
quantitative methods might express this more negatively by saying that those
methods threaten the differentiating, individualizing principle that makes
literary scholarship humanistic. I don’t expect this book to resolve the debate.
But I do want to propose that it should be interpreted as a debate about the
historical dimension of literary cultivation. Distant reading is not troubling to
literary scholars because we resist the numeric as such. After all, critics have
long counted sales figures and numbers of editions. Graphing macroscopic
trends is troubling, more fundamentally, because it challenges the principle
of contrast that has long distinguished literary culture from the forms of
learning purveyed by other disciplines.
1
Historical Unconsciousness
in the Novel, 1790 –1819
M
nineteenth-century historical
novels lend history an ironic grandeur by dramatizing characters’ inability to perceive the historical dimension of the events that surround
them. Walter Scott’s Edward Waverley attends a hunting party in the Highlands—only to discover a week later, when he is accused of treason, that the
hunting party was in fact the beginning of a Jacobite rebellion. In Stendhal’s
Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrizio wanders through the fields of Waterloo, buying and losing horses, shooting men and being shot at, trying vainly to locate
a battle. War and Peace elevates this kind of dramatic irony into a prescriptive
theory of history: “In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the Tree
of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and
he who plays a part in a historic event never understands its significance.”1
Critics of the novel place a high value on these ironies. But they have
interpreted them in radically different ways. For Georg Lukács, the sidelining
of individual protagonists marked a crucial stage in the novel’s approximation
to Marxism. “What matters . . . in the historical novel is not the re-telling of
great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in
those events.”2 The unplanned entanglements of Scott’s “mediocre heroes”
foreground these social forces, while marginalizing the sort of historical
narrative that celebrates fateful individual choice. Approaching the topic
from a different perspective, Nicola Chiaromonte concluded that the
opacity of history in the nineteenth-century novel was an early symptom
a n y o f t h e b e s t- k n o w n
17
18Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
of the century’s waning confidence that history had any humanly accessible
meaning—providential, Hegelian, or otherwise. What Lukács interpreted as
proto-Marxist popular history, Chiaromonte interpreted as a harbinger of
“the collapse of socialism.”3
Given the philosophical differences that separated these two readers, it
is not surprising that they attributed different kinds of significance to the
nineteenth-century historical novel. But it is a little surprising that they
chose to locate those diametrically opposed truths in the same aspect of the
form—in the protagonist’s inability to grasp the historical significance of
the plot. Critics have consistently been drawn to this blind spot, which gives
aesthetic form to the basic historicist insight that individual perspectives are
constituted by a social structure that may not itself be visible. But critics have
consistently read that insight as an expression of the principles that shape
their own methodology. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, traced Tolstoy’s theory of
history back to a skeptical reaction against the optimism of Enlightenment
historiography. Wolfgang Iser discovered in Scott what one might call a
reader-response theory of history, in which “eye-witnesses bring to life only
their own particular section of the fading past, so that each account clearly
presents only one aspect of reality and never the whole.”4 More recently, Ina
Ferris has correlated the formation of the historical novel (and the national
tale) with a debate that pitted the “official” history of “great public events”
against the unreadable traces of social history and local memory. 5 There
is, in short, a broad critical consensus that the historical novel’s emphasis
on opacity and necessary blindness enacts an important insight about
representation of the past—but no consensus at all about the insight it is
supposed to enact.
This chapter will not offer yet another account of that insight. On the
contrary, I’ll argue that there is less epistemological insight to explain than
critics have generally assumed, because versions of the dramatic irony that
critics appreciate in Scott and Stendhal already darkened the earlier works
of Ann Radcliffe and Lady Morgan. In Gothic novels, the collective past is
already as opaque as it will become in historical novels. In national tales, it is
already evident that protagonists are caught up in a larger story whose contours
exceed their individual field of vision. What changes between  and  is
not that writers discover a newly skeptical theory of social experience—but
rather that the mysterious opacity of the collective past (previously embodied
in landed property) is transposed onto personal historical cultivation. To
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
19
put this more pointedly: early-nineteenth-century novelists didn’t have to
invent a historicist aesthetic, they just had to show that it could serve as a
foundation for middle-class cultural distinction. As we’ll see in Chapters 
and , the limited, perspectival knowledge of history in Scott’s novels later
became a model for the first period survey courses. So by assigning a peculiar
prestige to half-knowledge of history, novelists like Radcliffe, Morgan, and
Scott were also, unwittingly, building a foundation for the cultural authority
of periodization in English departments.
Since “history” and “the collective past” may sound like synonyms, I
should explain what I mean by the latter phrase, which will be used here in
a broader sense. One of the salient characteristics of social existence is that
it takes place on a temporal scale larger than individual life. A group existed
before any of its members were born, and it generally continues in some
form after they die. When I talk about the “collective past,” or “collective
time,” I am referring simply to the way social life is set off from individual
experience by this difference of scale, whether the collective past is embodied
in institutions and inherited property, dramatized as myth and ritual, or
narrated as history.
Because the larger temporal scale of collective life is one of the primary
ways a group transcends its members, the symbols of collective time have
often doubled as symbols of public authority. As Zygmunt Bauman observes,
“long and carefully recorded pedigrees are significant through setting the
scions of long and known lineages apart from the commoners who cannot
trace their ancestors beyond a second or third generation . . . For similar
reasons, the splendour of old, inherited riches can never be matched by
the glitter of brand-new fortune.”6 In early modern Britain, legal authority
depended quite explicitly on this reification of collective time. Birth and
inherited property conveyed authority because they actually contained the
past. This was particularly true, as Wolfram Schmidgen has shown, of the
manorial estate. According to Edward Coke’s Compleate Copy-Holder (),
for instance, copy-hold estates were so intimately dependent on custom that
they contained time itself as a life-giving soul.
[T]ime is the mother, or rather the nurse of manors; time is the soule that
giveth life to every Manor, without which a Manor decayeth and dieth [. . .] .
Hence it is that the King himselfe cannot create a perfect Manor at this day,
for such things as receive their perfection by the continuance of time, come
not within the compasse of a Kings Prerogative . . . neither can the King create
20Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
any new custome, nor doe any thing that amounteth to the creation of a new
custome [. . .] .
For this reason it is important for Coke to show that “the self-same form of
manors remains unaltered in substance” since the Normans, and perhaps
even the Saxons.7
It would be a misunderstanding to suppose that, by gesturing at the
Normans, Coke is invoking the authority of “history.” As Reinhart Koselleck
has shown, our habit of invoking the past as “history”—using the word to
mean not merely a genre of writing, but the whole course of human events—
is a late-eighteenth-century innovation. It became possible to use the word
that way only after the discourse of universal history had popularized the
assumption that all human societies, past and present, were linked together
by the gradual “realisation of a hidden plan of nature” (to quote Kant).8 In
Edward Coke’s time, the authority of history was imagined less abstractly.
“Historia” was “magistra vitae” simply because books of history contained
a storehouse of discrete examples: admirable models and salutary warnings
that might guide a reader.9 But in most circumstances of daily life it was, of
course, impractical to consult a written account. The broader authority of the
past was therefore called “custom” or “antiquity,” and it did not have to be
borrowed from historians. The collective past was rather embodied in a wide
range of living institutions. The Church was a fellowship of the dead and the
living stretching back to Christ. The antiquity of a community was visible in
the graveyard and, as Coke takes pains to show, it constituted legal authority
in the manorial estate.
Wolfram Schmidgen’s study of “the law of property” argues that
community, legal authority, and time remained embedded in novelistic
descriptions of things (descriptions of land especially, but also other kinds of
property) through the end of the eighteenth century. Schmidgen concludes by
suggesting that in Radcliffe (and more decisively in Scott) this symbolic fusion
of time, space, and community began to give way to “the individualized,
privatized, and reified outlook of modern capitalism,” which disavows the
embedding of social relations in things. I agree with Schmidgen’s account
(and have already been specifically indebted to his interpretation of Edward
Coke) but I want to look more closely at the end of the process he describes,
because Schmidgen’s account would seem to contradict the critical consensus I
summarized at the beginning of this chapter. Schmidgen’s reading of Waverley
suggests that Scott separated time from the estate by insisting on the visibility
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
21
of discrete symbols of the past. “While the common law’s construction of
legitimacy relies on the assumption that not everything that can be known is
visible, Waverley’s description of landed property sponsors an epistemology
that equates the knowable with the visible.” The past is therefore reduced to
a visible token—for instance, to the famous portrait of Edward Waverley in
Highland dress that gets added to the walls of Tully-Veolan.10
This reading precisely reverses a prevailing narrative about the historical
novel. As I began the chapter by noting, many scholars have argued that
Scott advanced realism by discovering that “history” is as invisible and as
ubiquitous as the air. Schmidgen claims that Scott reified the past by making
it visible, where Lukacs and Iser suggested that his innovation was to make
history disappear. What explains this contradiction? I tend to think the
question of visibility, as such, is a red herring. There was a robust consensus
among novelists, from Ann Radcliffe through George Eliot, that the temporal
dimension of community was concealed from the casual observer. But different
genres and discourses defined the hidden temporal dimension of community
differently. Eighteenth-century novelists had envisioned collective time as
embedded in places and things—pre-eminently, in the manorial estate. But
as Gothic novels were displaced by national tales, and eventually by historical
novels, the customary authority of property was treated increasingly as an
empty sign. This is not quite to say that the past was condensed, as Schmidgen
suggests, into visible artefacts or museum exhibits.11 Rather, nineteenthcentury novelists began to imply that the really important, invisible part of
collective time was located in the minds of their characters—although only,
perhaps, as a slumbering potential, which the events of the narrative would
have to awaken and develop.
The central effect of this change, I will argue, was to shift the authority
of the collective past away from landed property and toward personal
cultivation. In this way, the national tale and historical novel participate in a
larger romantic-era argument that systematically redefined a whole range of
virtues (independence, for instance) so that they could be possessed not just
by landowners but by urban professionals and entrepreneurs.
Personal cultivation gives characters access to the collective past most
transparently when it takes the form of historical learning, and romanticera novelists did find a host of ingenious ways to make historical learning
drive a plot. Characters discover old manuscripts, study inscriptions, clean
gravestones, argue about Irish history, and claim to exhume Roman relics or
22Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
buried treasure. But the connection between cultivation and history is just
as frequently made in subtler ways, so that knowledge of poetry or natural
philosophy can carry the same social weight as historical learning. To
accomplish this, it is only necessary that the psychological depth characters
reveal, when they are quoting Shakespeare or studying Irish botany, should
eventually turn out to be temporal depth. It is only necessary that cultivation
should produce eerie parallels, or dreams, or flashes of déjà vu, which connect
present-day characters to an ancestral past, and reveal its persistence within
them. To foreshadow, briefly, a topic that the fifth chapter of this book will
tackle at more length: one of my reservations about the discourse of collective
“memory” in recent criticism is that it has tended to overread the figurative
differences between official history and this sort of déjà vu. “Memory” and
“history” are often, in post-romantic writing, different names for a single
fantasy—different ways of imagining collective time as something an
individual can internalize.
History becomes important in the romantic novel, in short, because
it allows characters to internalize the authority of the past—previously
embedded in institutions and property—as a portable attribute of character.
This promotes the importance of historical cultivation in particular, but it
is also a sign that learning in general was taking on a new social function.
The logic that fostered this new function has been explored convincingly in
Ernest Gellner’s account of the rise of nationalism. To sketch this briefly: in
industrializing societies, education acquires an economic importance that
eventually begins to shape collective identity. Ties of kinship and locality give
up some of their economic significance in favor of the portable social capital
that permits a worker to move from one occupation or location to another. As
an (indirect) consequence of these shifts, there is growing pressure to identify
the boundaries of the state with the boundaries of a distinctive national
culture, and to imagine collective identity in terms of cultivation. This logic
can confer a new social consequence even on forms of learning like botany
and chemistry, which might not immediately seem national. But the new
social centrality of learning is dramatized even more forcefully by literary and
historical cultivation, which illustrate the spatial boundaries that separate
each nation from others, as well as the temporal continuities that bind it to
itself. The eighteenth-century expansion of historiography to encompass the
history of manners and private life, as well as commerce and the arts, needs to
be understood in this context: the shift from a strictly political to a cultural
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
23
history parallels the rising economic significance of the “nation” vis-à-vis the
“state.”
To return, then, to the question that opened this chapter: What was
the insight that permitted Scott—and other early historical novelists—to
represent history as something invisible and ubiquitous? The question is
badly formed because no special insight was needed. Eighteenth-century
writers were already fascinated by the radical differences of scale that made
it difficult for individual observers to grasp collective change; “historicism”
is partly a name for growing consciousness of that blind spot. Eighteenthcentury novelists often embedded the mystery of the past in descriptions
of landed property, representing houses and landscapes as palimpsests
that record multiple overlapping layers of time. But at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the mystery of the past takes up residence in a different
aspect of novelistic form. Instead of informing the setting, it moves gradually
into character, where it manifests itself as a mode of cultivation that includes
both knowledge of the past and eerie blindness to it. This chapter traces that
process of translocation. In the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, I’ll argue,
personal cultivation remains so intimately bound up with the obscure
authority of landed property that it is difficult to distinguish the two. The
relationship between property and culture in the national tale is more difficult
to characterize, because one of the central projects of the genre is to rethink
that relationship. The national tales of Lady Morgan, for instance, begin by
linking national culture to the antiquity of property in a very Radcliffean way.
But in Morgan’s later novels, property loses much of its symbolic power, and
the grandeur of collective time is dramatized mainly by mysterious parallels
that bind characters to their precursors in a remote era of Irish history. The
chapter concludes by comparing two of Morgan’s novels to two of Scott’s
published in the same period, to highlight the way both authors use their
protagonists’ ignorance of the past to represent historical cultivation as a
sublimely elusive distinction that transcends ordinary categories of class. In
the late Regency period, the generic boundary between “national tales” and
“historical novels” is often less important than this shared fantasy.
Decaying Castles and Cultural Distinction
No reader of Ann Radcliffe will be surprised to learn that her novels
emphasize architectural setting. Ruined abbeys and castles dominate her
24Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
novels both by defining an atmosphere and by permitting reversals of fortune
that hinge on the discovery of secret panels, disused chambers, and forgotten
passageways to the sea. In this respect, Radcliffe typifies the late-eighteenthcentury beginnings of Gothic. As titles like The Recess () made plain well
before Radcliffe, architectural obscurity was central to the genre. Birgitta
Berglund points out that “the Gothic novel . . . came to be almost synonymous
with ‘novel set in a (mysterious and menacing) Gothic building,’” and
observes that more than a third of the books listed in a  prospectus from
the Minerva Press mention a castle, abbey, or mansion house in their titles.12
But in Radcliffe, the “mysterious and menacing” face of Gothic architecture
can be difficult to separate from the romance of gracefully decaying real estate.
The “magnificent remains of a castle” have now become “admirably beautiful
and picturesque”; the strongold “built on the summit of a rock” is located “in
the most romantic part of the Highlands.”13 This tension between architecture’s
archaic power and its present-day aesthetic value is enacted as well in Radcliffe’s
plots, which have a way of transforming estates into prisons, and prisons into
estates. For novels addressed to an audience of largely middle-class readers,
this structure offered an important advantage: Radcliffe’s protagonists could
acquire the connection to the past that distinguished the aristocracy while
regretting the abuses of aristocratic power. Better yet, in many of Radcliffe’s
novels, her protagonists acquire the first of these things precisely by suffering
the second. In an attempt to escape from a decaying Gothic building where they
have been unjustly imprisoned, they explore forgotten passages and stumble
on relics that reveal their own claims to birth and property. The protagonist’s
social ascent is often mediated by the discovery of a murdered or imprisoned
parent—a mystery that of course invites psychological interpretation. Marilyn
Butler has summed up the central action of Sicilian Romance and Romance
of the Forest, for instance, as a “Freudian effort to recover the past,” stressing
that the protagonist’s penetration “into the unknown recesses of a mysterious
building” is also penetration “backward in time.” The protagonist discovers
the forgotten, violent history of her own family by exploring a long-forgotten
part of the building.14
But this psychological reading of architecture is entirely compatible
with a reading that interprets Gothic settings materially, because the social
significance of property was likewise felt to depend on violent secrets hidden
in the past. In the late eighteenth century, the collective time contained in
landed property could no longer be imagined as the inheritance of unchanging
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
25
“custom” that Edward Coke had envisioned. It was plain, on the contrary, that
the refinement of the gentry had been founded on its very opposite: on the
rude manners of a primitive and violent era. The authority of the past thus
turned out to depend on a disturbing incongruity. The thrill of this contrast
is central to Radcliffe’s description of architecture. It is implicit in the tension
between violent purpose and picturesque effect that defines her castles, and
it sometimes becomes more explicit—for instance, in this passage from A
Sicilian Romance:
The view of this building revived in the mind of the beholder the memory of
past ages. The manners and characters which distinguished them rose to his
fancy, and through the long lapse of years he discriminated those customs
and manners which formed so striking a contrast to the modes of his own
times. The rude manners, the boisterous passions, the daring ambition, and
the gross indulgences which formerly characterized the priest, the nobleman,
and the sovereign, had now begun to yield to learning—the charms of refined
conversation—political intrigue and private artifices.15
In this passage, a sixteenth-century observer looks at a twelfth-century
building. But eighteenth-century readers are clearly invited to share the
observer’s uneasiness about the uncouth roots of the civilizing process. The
“boisterous passions” of the twelfth century disturb this observer rather as
the “political intrigue and private artifices” of his own sixteenth-century Italy
might disturb a Georgian reader.
Radcliffe’s next book, The Romance of the Forest, handles this sort of
contrast a little more subtly. Instead of explicitly describing a tension between
the manners of different ages, it weaves the theme of historical change into the
terrors of a twilit abbey, so that the fact of historical difference begins to feel
like one of the secrets concealed there. Searching for a hiding place, Pierre de
la Motte comes upon “the Gothic remains of an abbey” at dusk, and imagines
“the hymn of devotion” and “tears of penitence” that once filled the space.
He surveyed the vastness of the place, and as he contemplated its ruins, fancy
bore him back to past ages. ‘And these walls,’ said he, ‘where once superstition
lurked, and austerity anticipated an early purgatory, now tremble over the
mortal remains of the beings who reared them!’16
There is something a bit opaque about the relationship between the first and
second half of that last sentence. The specific social change that dispelled
“superstition” and “austerity” seems to be conflated with the universal fact of
26Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
mortality. But the nature of this connection, and the resulting thrill of terror,
are elucidated a few paragraphs further on, when La Motte explores the irony
more explicitly.
La Motte sighed. The comparison between himself and the gradation of
decay, which these columns exhibited, was but too obvious and affecting. “A
few years,” said he, “and I shall become like the mortals on whose reliques
I now gaze, and, like them too, I may be the subject of meditation to a
succeeding generation, which shall totter but a little while over the object they
contemplate, ere they also sink in the dust.”17
These passages are not reflecting simply on death. They more specifically
explore the irony of perspective that that allows each generation to recognize
the datedness of its predecessors, without being able to see the face they
will themselves present to a “succeeding generation.” The secret buried in
the Abbey of St. Clair, in other words, is the realization that the collective
dimension of time amounts to a terrifying blind spot.
Radcliffe’s treatment of this insight is rather explicitly modeled on James
Macpherson’s handling of the same theme. To underline the parallel, Radcliffe
introduces her description of the abbey with a quotation from Macpherson’s
“Carthon”: “The thistle shook its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind.”
The line is taken from a speech where Fingal reads a ruined hall (with ironic
prescience) as a sign of his own civilization’s limits. “They have but fallen
before us,” he reflects; “for, one day, we must fall.”18 “Carthon” finds a strange
sort of comfort in human beings’ inability to understand history by identifying
that temporal blind spot with Ossian’s visionary blindness. Radcliffe also
transforms the darkness of history into a sublime consolation, but she does
so in a more concretely acquisitive way. After the protagonist, Adeline, refuses
the advances of a voluptuary Marquis, he has her imprisoned in a relatively
modern part of the ruined abbey. She discovers a secret door in her chamber,
however, which allows her to descend to an older part of the structure. There
she discovers a rusty dagger and a manuscript written by a previous inmate.
The inmate turns out to have been a father Adeline never knew, murdered by
the Marquis, his half-brother. When the murder is revealed, Adeline retrieves
her father’s bones from the abbey, and preserves the manuscript that first gave
evidence of the crime “with the pious enthusiasm so sacred a relique deserved.”
Because Adeline never knew her real father, the discovery of this murder is
in effect Adeline’s discovery of her own biography. But the recovery of that
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
27
personal story is staged in a way that implicitly compares it to the recovery of
the social time contained in the abbey itself. To discover her father, Adeline
has to descend to the abbey’s “ancient foundation.”19 Her father turns out
to be one of the dead whose “reliques” La Motte could only imagine when
he first saw the abbey. Though this all seems ghoulish enough, the effect of
the parallel between personal and collective time—as far as plot goes—is to
make Adeline a Marchioness, whereupon the abbey that sustained the analogy
apparently becomes part of her estate. The terrifying historical blind spot that
the abbey initially dramatized thus becomes the foundation of present-day
social consequence. There are other sites of landed property in the novel, but
the Abbey of St. Clair becomes the central image of property precisely because
its layered obscurity allows it to conceal an alien and violent past.
Wolfram Schmidgen, who has done more than anyone to show that
Radcliffe’s abbeys and castles matter not just as props but as property,
nevertheless reads Radcliffe in a way that poses a significant obstacle for
the interpretation I have been advancing. I want to pause to consider his
reading, for though in the end I disagree with it, I think the questions he
asks are revealing ones. Schmidgen agrees that Radcliffe’s Gothic spaces
of confinement are designed to represent collective time as a palimpsest
composed of heterogenous layers. Indeed, he shows that the chronological
disunity of Radcliffe’s buildings strongly echoes an architectural metaphor
prevalent in late-eighteenth-century legal discourse, which compared English
law to an “old Gothic castle” with apartments constructed in different
centuries. The effect of this metaphor, in William Blackstone and Edmund
Burke, is to dramatize “the continuous influence of past over present,” and to
remind readers that landed property is the palpable embodiment of that social
continuity.20 But, Schmidgen argues, this metaphor serves a very different
purpose in Ann Radcliffe’s novels. Here, the Gothic castle is a figure of terror,
and the heroine must escape to a more transparent space. Schmidgen concedes
that this transparent space is not evident in Radcliffe’s first two works, and
adduces the chateau at Leloncourt, where Adeline flees for protection in The
Romance of the Forest, as the first good example of it.
Situated in Savoy, and presided over by a benevolent Rousseauvian
clergyman, this chateau is certainly an enlightened house, “characterised
by an air of elegant simplicity and good order.” But as often happens with
Radcliffe, obscurity and temporal depth are purged from this building only
to reappear in the surrounding landscape. Leloncourt is surrounded by “dark
28Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
woods” and “mountains of stupendous height . . . shooting into a variety
of grotesque forms”; moreover, the darkness of this landscape is explicitly
associated with the past. The benevolent clergyman, La Luc, often retires “to
the deep solitude of the mountains, and amid their solemn and tremendous
scenery . . . brood[s] over the remembrance of times past.” According to
Schmidgen, this landscape is relatively disenchanted. Radcliffe undoes “the
embedding figuration of time, space, and practice in the Gothic castle . . . by
creating distance between observer and scene and by mediating appearance
through spatial and temporal frames.”21 The effect is to separate La Luc
from the landscape and to thematize his investment in the land as a mode of
sentimental projection. There is some truth here: certainly the meaning of La
Luc’s chateau is mediated more explicitly through its owner’s sensibility than is
the case with Radcliffe’s more menacing buildings. But I don’t believe that this
sentimental frame changes the meaning of the estate itself: landed property is
still being used to evoke the sublime obscurity of collective time. Landscape
can represent this obscurity as effectively as architecture. For instance, when
Adeline accompanies La Luc on a tour of the mountains around Leloncourt,
she gazes out over a prospect that places distant alps behind “the ruins of a
fabric which once had been a castle.” “[T]hose stupendous mountains,” she
remarks, “the gloomy grandeur of these woods, together with that monument
of faded glory on which the hand of time is so emphatically impressed, diffuse
a sacred enthusiasm over the mind, and awaken sensations truly sublime.” “It
seems,” she continues a moment later, “as if we were walking over the ruins of
the world [. . .] .”22
Although Radcliffe’s enlightened chateaus and her Gothic castles
don’t represent fundamentally different kinds of property, Radcliffe’s
different characters do possess property in fundamentally different ways.
Where Radcliffe’s villains invoke property as an external source of power,
her virtuous characters internalize its authority, and transform it into a
melancholy kind of cultivation. For instance, Kate Ellis has remarked that
Radcliffe’s heroines exhibit an “exaggerated sensitivity to nature” when they
need to demonstrate their “independence from the market.”23 Though this is
true, the “nature” the heroine responds to is usually framed as a view from
an estate, and the heroine’s psychological independence remains explicitly
modeled on the older, more tangible independence of the landed proprietor.
The connection is perhaps clearest in Udolpho, where La Vallée is at once
Monsieur St. Aubert’s retreat from “the busy scenes of the world,” and a kind
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
29
of academy for sentimental heroines—complete with a library, a greenhouse
for the study of botany, and a secluded fishing-cottage in the woods where
music and poetry can be practiced. In this academy, his daughter learns that
mental cultivation guarantees independence. But Emily learns this lesson,
paradoxically, by borrowing an impulse from the property that surrounds
her. “[T]he gloom of the woods . . . the cottage-lights, now seen, and now
lost—were circumstances that awakened her mind into effort, and led to
enthusiasm and poetry.”24
In short, brigands and tyrants possess the past as ponderous stone;
Radcliffe’s heroines possess it by tenderly appreciating a gloomy landscape—
although, to be sure, they also end up owning the landscape. The point of
displacing magnificence from masonry to landscape is not to devalue landed
property, or to distinguish “nature” from “culture.” As I have noted, Radcliffe
sees very similar gulfs of time embodied in decaying battlements and in
the grotesque mountains that surround them. The point of foregrounding
landscape is rather to emphasize that, for Radcliffe’s heroines, property holds
an essentially inward value, mediated by taste and memory. They prefer
simple houses surrounded by magnificent landscapes because they are less
concerned to display magnificence than to take it in. The distinction between
mere possession and cultivated appreciation runs deeper, however, than the
boundary between the house and its grounds. The same distinction can be
dramatized by exploring different characters’ responses to the edifice itself.
Chateau-le-Blanc, where the last third of Udolpho is set, is a ruinous pile, but
for Count De Villefort it is associated with “the recollection of early pleasures”
that have solaced him during “a long intervening period amid the vexations
and tumults of public affairs” (). The Countess, however, is reluctant
“to resign the gay assemblies of Paris—where her beauty was generally
unrivalled, and won the applause, to which her wit had but feeble claim—
for the twilight canopy of woods, the lonely grandeur of mountains, and the
solemnity of gothic halls.” Preferring “gay assemblies” to ruined buildings
is a sign of superficiality because it reveals that the Countess’s conception
of society is focused shallowly on the present moment. Her voluble disdain
for “this barbarous spot” forces the Count to remind her that all presentday distinction is founded on forgotten barbarity: “madam . . . this barbarous
spot was inhabited by my ancestors.” His daughter Blanche requires no such
reminder, because she has read more widely than her stepmother. For her,
Chateau-le-Blanc recalls “a castle, such as is often celebrated in early story,
30Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
where the knights look out from battlements on some champion below, who,
clothed in black armor, comes with his companions, to rescue the fair lady of
his love from the oppression of his rival.”25
In short, Radcliffe insists that the prestige of landed property is authentic
only when property functions as the outward symbol of a hidden, inward
time-consciousness. Property has to remind its owner of childhood
memories, or of “early story,” or of “customs and manners” that form a
“striking . . . contrast with the modes of his own times.” The precise content
of these personal and historical recollections can be left rather vague.
History as such matters less, in Radcliffe’s novels, than the formal parallel
between time’s materialized authority and its subjective mystery. Neither
half of the equation can be entirely dispensed with. Until it is appreciated
by cultivated recollection, property is just vulgar display. But it is equally
true that speculation about the past, unsupported by property, produces
only fear and isolation. The protagonist’s sympathy with the past has to be
worked through in damp corridors, and transformed into ownership, before
it conveys any security or social consequence. In the last analysis, the effect
of Radcliffe’s novels is neither to celebrate the official authority of property,
nor to demystify property in favor of mental cultivation, but to compare her
cultivated characters’ depths to the traces of former ages that lurk beneath the
surface of a grand estate. In this way, she transforms the mystique of landed
property into something that can be acquired through education.
Property and National Culture in The Wild Irish Girl
The Gothic past typically emerges after a heroine has been rusticated in
Italy, Scotland, Germany, or provincial France. But Radcliffe’s exotic locations
are never simply savage: her brooding castles and mountains dramatize at
once the obscurity of the past and its power to generate cultural prestige. This
is the source of Radcliffe’s frequently-remarked similarity to travel literature.
If Radcliffe had actually been (say) Italian, one can imagine that she might
have added footnotes to tie the romance of setting even more closely to the
antiquity of specific places and customs. This is, in any case, very much what
happens in early-nineteenth-century Irish novels. The early national tales of
Lady Morgan and C. R. Maturin could almost be defined as Gothic novels
whose narrators identify ethnically with the Gothic setting they have chosen,
and therefore depict it in a richer and more particularized way.
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
31
The altered perspective changes the political argument of these novels
completely: Radcliffe has nothing like the national allegory that organizes (for
instance) Morgan’s Wild Irish Girl. If, on the other hand, one subordinates
national politics to social wish-fulfillment, national tales and Gothic novels
can appear very similar. The connection between Radcliffe and the early novels
of Lady Morgan (then Sydney Owenson) is particularly close. Both authors
stage a protagonist’s encounter with a frightening backwater (a castle in the
Appenines, or on the west coast of Connaught), only to transform the external
threat into a scene of self-discovery, so that the protagonist can appropriate
the barbaric other as a forgotten or suppressed dimension of his or her own
character. Both authors, in other words, make the obscurity of the social past
serve as an engine of personal cultivation. In Radcliffe this engine is implicit
in description, without becoming central to the plot: the historical mystery
contained in architecture dramatizes characters’ subjective depth, but does
little more than parallel the more immediately familial mystery that drives the
action. In Morgan’s national tales, the story of historical cultivation moves to
center stage. Characters’ relations with each other become inextricably bound
up with their relationship to an unfolding mystery about the national past.
Morgan’s early novels are thus in a sense perfected Gothics: Gothic novels
whose setting has acquired a more intelligible relation to plot.
This composite portrait is admittedly sketched with a broad brush, and
needs to be qualified in several ways. It matters that the past is repressed by
colonial power in Morgan’s novels, not hidden in a dungeon. And it matters
that the culture acquired by Morgan’s protagonists is explicitly national in
character. But Morgan’s nationalism doesn’t change the social wish-fulfillment
in her novels as radically as one might suppose. Since twentieth-century
anthropologists made a point of distinguishing the descriptive and normative
senses of the word “culture,” it is easy to assume that “national culture” names
an automatic possession, quite distinct from the sort of “culture” one might
strive to acquire.26 If one started from that assumption, comparing Morgan’s
“culture” to Radcliffe’s would be a semantic fallacy. But at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the aspirational and ethnographic senses of “culture”
were not yet crisply distinguished; in fact, if Ernest Gellner is correct about
the history of nationalism, the impulse to ethnographically define “national
culture” was largely generated by a need to defend local cultural credentials
against metropolitan competition.27 For this reason it is not surprising that
early national tales articulate the value of national culture by drawing on
32Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
older, pre-nationalist models of community. The protagonists of Morgan’s
early novels still acquire culture much as Gothic heroines had acquired it, by
plumbing the temporal depths of landed property. Though they are ostensibly
repossessing a national legacy, their connection to the past still depends, in
practice, on the collective time embodied in individual estates.
Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent () is usually described as the first
“national tale,” but Morgan’s  novel, The Wild Irish Girl, established
the outlines of a plot that became more typical of the genre: an Anglo-Irish
absentee or cosmopolitan exile returns to Ireland to discover its national
culture and confront its economic degradation. Mortimer, the protagonist of
Wild Irish Girl, is the English-educated scion of an Anglo-Irish family with
possessions in Connaught. His father exiles him to those possessions after a
career of dissipation in London, and he travels, with rueful winces, into what
he considers a savage land. Once in Connaught, he is gradually won over by
the magnificence of landscape and architecture, by the antique dignity of Irish
manners, and by the charms of Glorvina, the harp-playing daughter of an
Irish prince who belongs, in fact, to the very family his seventeenth-century
ancestors violently dispossessed. The marriage between Mortimer and
Glorvina that ends the novel is explicitly compared to the  Act of Union,
establishing a political allegory that figures benevolent English colonialism as
a restoration of ancient Irish right.28
The novel is organized around a gradual unveiling of culture—so gradual,
in fact, that it is never quite completed. Dismayed by his first encounters
with Ireland, Mortimer discovers that the far west of Connaught shelters
a more ancient and authentic national character. Without using the word
“culture,” Morgan defines this character in a way that foreshadows the
ambiguous breadth of significance “culture” would soon acquire. Footnotes
about the customs and dress of the peasantry describe Irish ways of life
ethnographically. But national identity is also represented as a principle of
personal development, dramatized especially by Glorvina’s “versatile genius,”
“whose nutritive warmth cherishes into existence that richness and variety
of talent which wants only a little care to rear it to perfection.”29 This uneasy
compound of ethnographic description and educational prescription advances
an argument central to cultural nationalism: that the folkways of Connaught,
and the talents of educated Irish professionals, are somehow mysteriously
the same. But the novel’s techniques for turning culture into narrative aren’t
as specifically national (or professional) as this argument might lead one to
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
33
expect. Mortimer progresses toward a truer understanding of Ireland largely
by traveling through a series of emblematic estates, which at once reveal and
conceal the Irish past.
He first arrives at M——house, the family seat, a “bleak and solitary”
place that “has neither the architectural character of an antique structure,
nor the accommodation of a modern one.” Here he is introduced to his
father’s tyrannous agent, Mr Clendinning, and to the social problems
associated with absentee ownership. M——house figures the Ireland that
English colonialism has created: deprived of ancient grandeur without the
compensations of modern prosperity. From this residence Mortimer flees
to the Lodge, a smaller property situated in a wilder and more beautiful
landscape. Here several descriptive features suggest a colonial appropriation
of Irish culture: the building is surrounded by “groves druidically venerable,”
and the bedroom usually occupied by Mortimer’s father is stocked with books
about “the language, history, and antiquities of Ireland.”30 An atmosphere of
mystery surrounds this property, hinting that a deeper past lies somewhere
just beyond it. When Mortimer finally travels through the Lodge to reach
the Castle of Inismore, he discovers an estate whose magnificence depends
on its occlusion by historical change. Bathed in the light of a declining sun
and of declining power, the Castle of Inismore evokes a culture that is at once
eminent, ancient, and marginal.
Landed property is not the only symbol of national culture in The Wild Irish
Girl. Morgan’s characters, and her ethnographic footnotes, also carry much of
the burden. But descriptions of character and manners are insistently paired
with descriptions of property. M——house is surrounded by sullen, grasping
peasants, while the peasants around the Castle of Inismore are “original and
primitive.”31 The Prince of Inismore becomes a human embodiment of the
spirit of property, characterized primarily by the mournful pride he takes
in his own family seat and, more generally, in all the ruined properties of
Ireland. He rhapsodizes on the topic in quasi-Ossianic language:
But the splendid dwelling of princely grandeur, the awful asylum of monastic
piety, are just mouldering into oblivion with the memory of those they once
sheltered. The sons of little men triumph over those whose arm was strong in
war, and whose voice breathed no impotent command; and the descendant of
the mighty chieftain has nothing left to distinguish him from the son of the
peasant, but the decaying ruins of his ancestors’ castle . . . 32
34Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
Of course, the Ossianic coloring of this speech marks a degree of self-conscious
archaism. The “Herculean” but stooped figure of the Prince defines him as a
living ruin, and his less than perceptive interactions with other characters
suggest that the authority of property is no longer a strong foundation for
personal or national greatness.
The friendship between the Prince and Mortimer is sealed, for instance,
by the fact that Mortimer presents himself as a landscape artist interested in
sketching the castle. Although Mortimer was indeed impressed by the castle,
he is seeking more specifically to get a view of Glorvina, having been attracted
by her “low wild tremulous voice” singing to a harp. This incident tells us
most of what we need to know about father and daughter. If the Prince is
characterized mainly through his ruined castle, Glorvina is characterized
through her “versatile genius,” which encompasses Irish song, botany, and
French and Italian literature. (Although Morgan represents Glorvina’s genius
as “national” and “natural,” the content of her education remains in fact
quite cosmopolitan—another sign that the book’s concept of national culture
is not very remote from older models of cultivation.) Together, father and
daughter dramatize the interdependence of property and culture. Radcliffe
had represented that connection psychologically, by measuring different
characters’ responses to the “hand of time” impressed on architecture and
landscape. In The Wild Irish Girl, Morgan represents the same connection
more allegorically, by condensing Ireland into a family of two: a father
obsessed with ruined property, and a daughter obsessed with the arts. Father
and daughter belong together, as Morgan makes clear, because inherited
property and rank permit national culture to reach its highest expression.
For all her mysterious self-sufficiency, Glorvina seems tethered to her
father’s castle: a genius loci who never strays far from the landscape of her
inheritance. Glorvina uses the concept of “true Milesian” descent, moreover,
in a way that fuses the purity of national culture with the purity of noble
lineage; though the novel pokes some fun at “Milesian” titles, it celebrates
this aspect of Glorvina’s pride in a way that finally endorses her identification
of national culture with a national aristocracy.33 Like Edgeworth, Morgan
tends to assume that the political problems of Ireland can only be resolved by
educating a more enlightened, patriotic, and cohesive landowning class.34 In
this sense, The Wild Irish Girl represents culture as an aristocratic possession
more explicitly than Radcliffe had.
But precisely by giving the connection between culture and property a
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
35
new allegorical clarity, Morgan fractures it. In Radcliffe, these dimensions of
the collective past had been inseparable: Radcliffe’s protagonists can develop
historical sensibility only by exploring “the solemnity of gothic halls” (and
the equally solemn landscapes that surround them). In The Wild Irish Girl,
literary cultivation constitutes a separate erotic subplot: Glorvina instructs
Mortimer about Ossian, and Mortimer returns the favor by giving her copies
of Werther and La Nouvelle Heloise. Once mind has been separated from
matter in this way, the symbolic power of property begins to look like an
anachronism. The Prince’s equation of gentility with land actually diminishes
his stature; his fortunes are failing, as the local priest observes, because he
“likes to hold more land in his hands than he is able to manage.” The future
of Ireland belongs not to the Prince but to his cultivated daughter. Similarly,
personal memory begins to displace aristocratic tradition: recalling ancestral
heroism “was once the business of our Bards, Fileas, and Seanachies,”
Glorvina remarks, “but we are now obliged to have recourse to our own
memories, in order to support our own dignity.”35 Passages like these hint at
the possibility of a direct connection between national history and personal
memory, unmediated by property or lineage—a possibility that Morgan
developed more richly in her later novels.
The Internalization of National History:
O’Donnel and Florence Macarthy
As Ina Ferris has observed, Lady Morgan’s heroines change fundamentally
in her later novels. The heroines of O’Donnel (), Florence Macarthy (),
and The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties () are never rooted, like Glorvina,
to a spot. They are characterized, on the contrary, by an intensely theatrical
mobility—popping up in unexpected places, often in disguise, and sustaining
multiple identities on widely separated levels of the social hierarchy. Ferris
persuasively argues that this transformation of female character is connected
to a reconsideration of national culture, replacing the “drive to a Gaelic
origin” with a new consciousness both of internal division and of the power
that might be latent in hybridity.36 But the transformation of the Morgan
heroine also expresses the author’s shifting assumptions about the personal
sources of cultural authority. The heroines of Morgan’s later novels are not
rooted to a spot because their power never depends, as Glorvina’s did, on the
antiquity of an estate. They are instead writers of national tales (like Lady
36Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
Clancare), founders of semi-religious educational institutions (like Beavoin
O’Flaherty), and masterfully theatrical governesses (like Miss O’Halloran).
They may acquire property and a title by the end of the novel: Miss O’Halloran
for instance eventually becomes the Duchess of Belmont. But the acquired
property is rarely described at length; it confirms the heroine’s ascent, but
it never becomes integral to her character, as the Castle of Inismore defined
Glorvina.
In short, Lady Morgan’s later novels strive to distinguish personal
cultivation from social status. Cultural authority is not made to depend
on rank or property; on the contrary, it dramatizes independence from
those criteria of gentility. Male and female characters claim this sort of
independence in slightly different ways. Introducing General Fitzwalter in
Florence Macarthy, the author makes the logic of cultural autonomy as overt
as Pierre Bourdieu himself could desire: “Neither could the term gentility be
appropriately applied to an appearance which had a character beyond it. He
might have been above or below heraldic notices and genealogical distinctions,
but he was evidently independent of them.” Fitzwalter is not “assignable to a
class, a cast, a country” because his travels and philosophic reflections allow
him to claim a cultural distinction that ostensibly transcends the ordinary
field of social competition.37 Many of Morgan’s heroines are as well-traveled
as Fitzwalter; those who are not, use their consummate powers of masquerade
to become equally unplaceable. Because Lady Clancare can impersonate every
walk of Irish life (from Catholic peasants and nuns to true-blue Protestant
matrons), she acquires the privilege of laughing at the social hierarchy as a
whole from a position ostensibly located outside it.
Morgan’s new emphasis on the mobile autonomy of culture might seem
to create problems for an author of “national tales.” If cultural authority
is not rooted in ancient property—if it depends, in fact, on social and
physical mobility—how can it remain connected to nationality and to a
collective past? Morgan’s solution is to set her characters’ actions against
the backdrop of analogous actions, carried out by analogous characters, in
a much earlier era. Through patterns of uncanny re-enactment, as well as
significant contrast, the present-day plotline thus gradually acquires a weight
of national and collective significance. Morgan’s backstories often take the
form of a chronicle or legend about the protagonist’s ancestors; the implicitly
hereditary logic of this connection between past and present reveals that
Morgan’s version of culture may not be quite as independent of “genealogical
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
37
distinctions” as her narrator claims. But the vector of change is nevertheless
significant.
The patterns of re-enactment and contrast in O’Donnel were partly
determined by the history of its composition. In , Morgan was working on
a novel about Red Hugh O’Donnel, who fought the Nine Years’ War against
the English during the reign of Elizabeth. Morgan had completed one volume
of this work when she realized that the subject could still rouse extremely
bitter memories. As she explains in the introduction, “I abandoned, therefore,
my original plan, took up a happier view of things, advanced my story to more
modern and more liberal times, and exchanged the rude chief of the days of
old, for his polished descendant in a more refined age.”38 Morgan’s relatively
cautious approach to reform is certainly perceptible here; as Barry Sloane has
suggested, she avoids straining “the sympathies of her English publisher and
readers” by refusing to trace injustice to its origins.39 But Morgan’s way of
putting this is also significant: she goes looking not just for a more peaceful
age but for a “more liberal,” “polished,” and “refined” one. The refinement of
the modern Colonel O’Donnel is in fact Morgan’s solution to Irish political
troubles. Excluded by penal laws from his ancestral property, condescended
to by English tourists, O’Donnel remains at all times a pattern of cultivation
and restraint.
Through most of the novel’s first volume we see O’Donnel through
the eyes of English gentry who meet him on a tour of Ireland’s northwest
coast, and know him only as a reserved stranger who reads Newton and
Adam Smith. His history and the revelation of his inner life are saved for the
beginning of the second volume, when a carriage accident forces the English
travelers to take shelter in O’Donnel’s house. Here they discover a painful
contrast between his intellectual cultivation (revealed in books and scientific
equipment) and his material circumstances (revealed in poorly-swept dirt
floors). The mystery of that contrast begins to be explained when a servant
shows them a fragmentary manuscript which is in effect a condensed version
of the historical novel Morgan originally set out to write. The mansucript
explains how the Red O’Donnel, heir to all of modern Donegal, was tricked
and imprisoned by the English in the sixteenth century, how he escaped,
and how he died, after years of war, fruitlessly seeking Spanish assistance.
The discovery of this manuscript is rapidly followed by others: the house
also contains a portrait of a more recent ancestor, the Abbé O’Donnel, who
repeated certain aspects of the Red O’Donnel’s story—becoming a talented
38Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
but “unrecompensed” agent of Spain, and losing the remnants of his family
property to English penal laws. Finally we learn about Colonel O’Donnel’s
own career, which has followed much the same pattern: he has already seen
service abroad (where, like the Abbé, he found that the talents of a foreigner
are often resented), and within a few chapters he will lose his last leased
plot of land. O’Donnel’s mysterious combination of distinction and poverty
is explained, in short, by establishing a series of parallels that link him to
other moments in Irish history when deserving leaders were driven abroad by
English hostility, and became the tools of foreign powers.
Gothic novels had used ancestral echoes for different purposes. In Udolpho,
for instance, Emily St. Aubert explores the bedroom where the Marchioness
de Villeroi was murdered, and discovers a portrait of the Marchioness that
uncannily resembles herself.40 As often in Radcliffe, the protagonist seems
to be re-enacting her mother’s (or father’s) fate. But the distance of a single
generation is too small to evoke the collective past—to do that, Radcliffe
relies instead on descriptions of architecture and landscape. O’Donnel adopts
a different strategy, which permits it to locate the authority of the past in
character rather than setting. The motif of uncanny repetition is stretched
out over centuries, in order to identify national history with the parallels and
contrasts that connect the protagonist to his (or her) equivalents in other
epochs.
The significance of this strategy would be easy to misunderstand, because
O’Donnel’s consciousness of repetition sometimes appears in the guise of
aristocratic family honor—for instance, when he has qualms about selling
his ancestor’s sword to raise badly-needed money. But though O’Donnel
represents Irish history as the history of a family, the novel explicitly
undermines O’Donnel’s faith in the continuity of family honor. In order to
heal the errors of the past, he has to let go of those aristocratic pieties. In the
end, O’Donnel does sell his ancestor’s sword (or at least its hilt). After slightly
more hesitation, he pawns a ring given to him by Marie Antoinette. Though he
enlists in foreign armies, he specifically refuses to fight for Spain, the nation
his ancestors had served. Spain is England’s enemy in the Peninsular War—
as it had been in the time of the Red O’Donnel—and Colonel O’Donnel is
unwilling to follow his ancestors by taking up arms against England. Perhaps
most importantly, he angrily corrects his servant’s claim that the O’Donnels
are still the rightful owners of all the estates their ancestors lost to antiCatholic penal laws. The penal laws may have been unjust, but O’Donnel
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
39
believes that “possessions long maintained, however gotten, are consecrated
by the lapse of ages, and held by the best of all tenures, prescriptive right.”41
In all of these instances, O’Donnel breaks with his ancestors in order to
dramatize the author’s view that the prosperity of Ireland depends on “a spirit
of accomodation and conciliation in all parties.”42 Catholics should receive full
political rights, in exchange for fully accepting the present distribution of
property. As Mary Jean Corbett has shown, Morgan had already expressed
similar opinions in The Wild Irish Girl.43 But The Wild Irish Girl made a rather
awkward vehicle for this opinion. Although the novel insists that property is
a settled question, for most of its length it hovers nostalgically over the lost
or ruined properties of the Catholic aristocracy. O’Donnel, by contrast, can
resign lost property without dissonance, because property is no longer the
novel’s central symbol of Irish history. The family estate that O’Donnel finally
recovers is hardly described at all—only mentioned in an anticlimactic coda
to the book. The cottage built by O’Donnel’s uncle, the Abbé, receives slightly
more attention: in a twist on Gothic tradition, it is said to have been built
with materials borrowed from a larger ruin connected to the family’s past. But
this humble house is very unlike Radcliffe’s sprawling structures. It becomes
important not as a symbol of the past in its own right, but as an occasion for
subjective meditations that correlate historical and personal time. Toward the
end of the book, O’Donnel is returning on foot to the cottage, where he will
be surprised to find the Duchess of Belmont, and a marriage that resolves the
problems of money and status that have dogged him throughout the novel. But
before reaching this happy ending, the novel pauses to remind the reader once
again that O’Donnel’s sufferings have a national and representative character.
It achieves this, oddly, by allowing the protagonist to review different epochs
of his own life.
As he passed through the rocky defile which led immediately to the humble
residence of his youth, the memory of former times rose vividly on his mind.
He recalled in a rapid review the several periods at which he had formerly
passed this little ravine, when each time, as he thought, he was never to behold
it more. In boyhood, when warm and aspiring, unworn in spirit, and fresh in
feeling, he forgot the dark destiny which urged on his wandering steps, and
saw only the beacon light of hope which guided him to glory and renown.
Again, when his fortunes had fallen with those of an empire [in the French
Revolution], after a short interval of repose, he had left the temporary asylum
of its solitudes, to draw, for the first time, his sword under the consecrated
40Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
shadow of his country’s banner. In a still more mature period of life, he sought,
for a third time, among these rocks, a shelter from poverty and despair; but
rising again superior to the wreck of all his hopes, he had again gone forth to
earn subsistence by his sword.44
The life that flashes before O’Donnel’s eyes in this passage is, in effect, the life
of a whole class of Irish gentry. O’Donnel’s memories are organized around
three moments of self-chosen exile—a pattern that is heavily overdetermined
in a novel whose fundamental critique of colonial rule is that it fails to
provide opportunities for native talent, forcing Ireland’s natural leaders to
seek their fortunes abroad. Indeed, O’Donnel’s three moments of leave-taking
roughly recapitulate the novel’s abbreviated history of his family (and Ireland
itself)—from the Red O’Donnel’s naïve confidence, through the Abbé’s
excessive reliance on a foreign “empire” (inflected, perhaps, by memories of
), to Colonel O’Donnel’s own “poverty and despair” in a world stripped
of chivalric illusion.
This passage is as close as O’Donnel comes to a moment of anagnorisis:
the location of the passage, and the expectant intensity of its rhetoric, strongly
suggest that O’Donnel is recognizing, for the first time, the underlying
pattern of his life. But for a moment of self-recognition, it is oddly void of
personal implications. Reviewing these three moments of departure does not
lead O’Donnel to any decision, or give him a tragic insight into his destiny.
The significance of the pattern he glimpses seems to lie instead in the loose
parallel it establishes between his life and the life of the nation. Even this is
left unstated. Instead of recognizing anything specifiable about his identity as
an Irishman, O’Donnel receives a vague intimation of collective promise and
disappointment.45
Because Colonel O’Donnel’s own memories and family history recapitulate
the history of the nation, O’Donnel can dispense with the symbolic geography
of property Morgan used to represent history in The Wild Irish Girl. Although
the subtitle of the novel announces it as a “national tale,” O’Donnel in fact
troubles Katie Trumpener’s assertion that the national tale before Waverley
maps culture across space rather than time. 46 O’Donnel’s relationship to his
own (personal and familial) past dramatizes cultural change in somewhat
the same way that Edward Waverley’s will do, and it is not surprising to find
that Scott enjoyed the novel.47 The next section of this chapter will give fuller
attention to the connections between Scott and Morgan.
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
41
Tales of Historical Amnesia: Guy Mannering and The Antiquary
When Walter Scott is juxtaposed with Lady Morgan, there is a tendency
to treat the contrast between the two authors as a synecdoche for a generic
boundary. Scott comes to represent “the historical novel,” while Morgan
stands for “the national tale.”48 In fact, the generic boundary runs through
the œuvres of these two authors rather than between them. Morgan’s The
O’Briens and the O’Flaherties is a historical novel by almost any definition
of the genre: it dramatizes the transformation of national culture (as Katie
Trumpener would demand), and the lives of its characters are intertwined
with great public events (as Avrom Fleishman would demand).49 It has always
been unclear, on the other hand, why Guy Mannering or The Antiquary should
be called historical novels. Scott’s second and third works of fiction lack the
epic scope of Waverley; except for an invasion that fails to happen at the end
of The Antiquary, they focus on private life. Works of this sort can fit within
a flexible definition of “the historical novel”; they are set a few decades in
the past, and are certainly “works in which historical probability reaches a
certain level of structural prominence,” to borrow Harry Shaw’s capacious
description of the genre.50 But several works by Lady Morgan would fit that
definition at least as well as these puzzling works by Scott.
I would suggest that the distinction between “national tales” and
“historical novels” is best understood as a gradual transformation perceptible
within the œuvres of several different novelists, rather than as a contrast
between authors. In the middle of the Regency period (between  and ),
Scott and Morgan each wrote several novels that are difficult to assign to either
genre. In fact, four of the novels they wrote in these years are so similar that
they might be seen as comprising a coherent sub-genre, located transitionally
between the “national tale” and the “historical novel.” O’Donnel and Florence
Macarthy by Morgan, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary by Scott, can all be
described as stories about an exile who returns to repossess alienated property
on Britain’s colonial margins. In all four novels, the exiled protagonist is a
military man who travels incognito; in all four novels, the discovery of the
exile’s true identity is a crucial turning-point in the plot. Moreover, all four
novels contain a back-story about the protagonist’s ancestors, and the gradual
revelation of that back-story generates much of the suspense in the latter
half of the narrative. All four novels also contain a substantial admixture of
romance elements, woven into the ancestral back-story: there is a prophecy
42Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
connected to the alienated estate, and the protagonist can only repossess the
estate by repeating or reversing the historical traumas his ancestors suffered.51
One might call these novels, for lack of a better term, “tales of historical
amnesia.” They are not as obsessed with national character as The Wild
Irish Girl or Castle Rackrent; nor are they as concerned to dramatize social
change as Waverley and Old Mortality. Instead they dramatize history as an
occluded memory that needs to be revived before the protagonist can claim
the authority of the past.
The coherence of this transitional sub-genre has been obscured, in large
part, by the accident that Scott’s famous first novel owed less to the national
tale than his second and third did. Guy Mannering and The Antiquary may be
located, formally, between the national tale and the historical novel, but they
are not “transitional” works in a causal, biographical sense. Scott did not have
to write them before he could write Waverley. For that reason, the significance
of the intermediate position they occupy has not often been remarked. Even
a novel like Waverley, of course, has a great deal in common with the national
tale—from the logic of uneven development that guides Waverley’s travels to
the national marriage that ends his story. But since Waverley is also strongly
indebted to the tradition of “anti-romance” that stretches back through
Fielding and Defoe to the seventeenth century, its points of connection to the
national tale appear, on the whole, more parodic than genuine.52 Waverley has
remained a critical touchstone, not just because it was Scott’s first novel, but
because this anti-romantic tone enables a crisp demarcation between genres—
a convenient demarcation for critics who want to represent Scott’s historicism
as another disenchanting insight in the long march of realism. As a corrective
to that emphasis, I’d like to stress the romance elements that link Scott’s
second and third novels to the contemporaneous works of Lady Morgan. If we
attend to those connections, they may reveal how the disenchanting insights
of historicism were themselves fueled by social fantasy.
The four novels I have christened “tales of historical amnesia” resemble
each other in a number of significant ways: the sub-genre deserves to be
connected, for instance, to the Napoleonic wars and to colonialism.53 In what
follows, however, I will focus on the way these novels collectively refigure
the prestige of the past. In examining Morgan’s two contributions to this
group of novels, I have already suggested that the motif of historical amnesia
tends to displace the authority of collective time from landed property to the
historical consciousness of individual characters. Historical consciousness
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
43
drives the plot, of course, in the negative form of historical unconsciousness:
suspense hinges, not on what characters know, but on parts of the back-story
that are forgotten or unexplained. But the continuity of collective life depends
on overcoming that amnesia. Plots are managed so that the protagonist’s
exploration of his relationship to the past restores order to a local community,
and status to the protagonist himself. This may mean that the protagonist
recovers a lost estate or title. But because he has served as a military officer in
the interim, the trappings of aristocracy now appear to be earned rather than
inherited: the landed gentry loses authority in order to recover a transformed
kind of status through the genteel professions. This recovery of status also
depends, in all four novels, on an archival subplot. The protagonist’s efforts
to reveal the true relationship of past and present are seconded by the labors
of an antiquary, like Jonathan Oldbuck, or an oral historian, like Terence
Oge O’Brien or Meg Merrilies—or they are supplemented, as in O’Donnel, by
fragmentary chronicles incorporated in the text. The military man’s strenuous
commitment to profession can be consecrated as the equivalent of aristocratic
birth only after it has been enriched in this way by historical perspective.
Not too long ago, the authority of landed property seemed profoundly
central to Scott’s fiction. According to Alexander Welsh, the Waverley novels
collectively composed a “romance of property,” organized around a “hero of
prescription”—an insight that has shaped much of the best subsequent work
on Scott. For Welsh the inheritance of land lies at the center of Scott’s plots, and
the passivity of the hero corresponds to the almost metaphysical passivity that
Burke and Blackstone attribute to real estate.54 This characterization of Scott
is accurate and useful for critics who are mainly interested in contrasting him
to other nineteenth-century fiction: Scott’s estates do carry more social weight
than, say, estates in Dickens. But an early-nineteenth-century reader, familiar
only with the fiction of the previous century, might have been surprised
less by the prominence of Scott’s estates than by their volatile and comic
fortunes. Much recent scholarship on Scott has been devoted to illuminating
this point. Wolfram Schmidgen has persuasively read Waverley as a story
about the hollowing-out of the traditional authority embodied in Baron
Bradwardine’s estate of Tully-Veolan. The weather-beaten bears and other
emblems of “ancestral right” are destroyed by English soldiers, and although
the estate is restored at the end of the novel, Schmidgen argues that its passage
through English ownership has left it “disembedded from its social, political,
and national contexts, . . . a museum of Scottish history” rather than a living
44Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
tradition.55 Much the same thing could be said about The Antiquary, where
estates similarly have to be rescued by bourgeois or apparently “illegitimate”
owners in order to be preserved at all. In the process, the authority of landed
property is tacitly compared to the dubious authenticity of the antiquarian
relics that various characters bury, pretend to discover, or use to pay their
debts. The effect (as Yoon Sun Lee has observed) is to erode the distinction
between the historical authority of a possession and its commercial value.56
Moreover, as Shawn Malley notices, Scott described the construction of his
“new old” estate at Abbotsford with a similarly ironic self-consciousness.57
The debts that eventually beset Abbotsford certainly only heightened Scott’s
skepticism about architectural illusions of permanence; the frame story to
Chronicles of the Canongate () implies quite pointedly, with bitter selfconsciousness, that the continuity of written memory is more reliable than the
sort of continuity embodied in property.58 In short, the historical authority
of the landed estate is certainly a central motif in Scott—but it is usually a
darkly comic motif.
Guy Mannering illustrates this backhanded respect for property in a way
that is particularly relevant to the thesis of this chapter, because it shows how
Scott’s extended descriptions of ruins and castles can actually emphasize
their ineffectiveness as symbols of historical continuity. The story behind
Mannering pivots on a case of amnesia. Harry Bertram, heir to the Ellangowan
estate, is kidnapped at the age of five, fulfilling predictions made at his birth
both by the gypsy Meg Merrilies and (more playfully) by Guy Mannering,
an English gentleman who dabbles in astrology. Almost seventeen years later,
after an army career in India, Bertram returns to Scotland as Vanbeest Brown,
unaware of his true name, class, and nationality. The central action of the
novel is the revelation of Bertram’s identity and the recovery of his estate. As
Ian Duncan has observed, this story of an heir lost and found in fulfillment of
prophecy “is a remarkable imitation . . . of a Shakespearian romance plot.”59
The specifically historical constraints on the novel are, by contrast, relatively
slight. Though the plot is enriched in many ways by Scott’s familiarity with
the characters and manners of eighteenth-century Scotland, it need not have
taken place specifically in the s and s.
Guy Mannering does use property as a concrete symbol of national history.
Divided into a ruined Auld Place and a New Place built shortly after the Acts
of Union, Ellangowan is also surrounded by a landscape that shades from a
pastoral foreground into “remoter hills . . . of a sterner character” that evoke
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
45
a warlike past. But the symbolism of this setting is laid on so thickly that
it provides an occasion for a deflating self-consciousness very characteristic
of Scott. We see Ellangowan first through the eyes of Guy Mannering, an
Oxford-educated Englishman who has been touring the Scottish frontier,
making drawings of “monastic ruins.”60 His appreciation of Ellangowan’s
division into Auld and New drifts into free indirect discourse, and into an
embarassingly explicit projection of desire.
How happily, thought our hero, would life glide on in such a retirement!
On the one hand, the striking remnants of ancient grandeur, with the secret
consciousness of family pride which they inspire; on the other, enough of
modern elegance and comfort to satisfy every moderate wish. Here then, and
with thee, Sophia!—
We shall not pursue a lover’s day-dream any farther.61
As he wrote Guy Mannering, Scott was planning Abbotsford, and he was
already quite aware that architectural historicism could invent a “secret
consciousness of family pride” and fuse it with “moderate” and “modern”
comfort. His self-consciousness about that aspiration is expressed here
through ostentatiously fictive gestures (e.g., “thought our hero”) that
surround the fantasy and identify it as a “lover’s day-dream.”
The same wryness persists throughout the book whenever history
materializes as architecture. Like Mannering, Harry Bertram enters Scotland
as a tourist making sketches; one of the first things he does there is to
climb Hadrian’s wall to “moralise” in explicitly predictable ways about the
contrast between modernity and antiquity.62 Bertram and Mannering are
both sympathetic characters, and it would be a mistake to read the narrator’s
wryness at these moments as outright satire. The narrator calls attention
to the projective dimension of ruin sentiment, not to mock his characters’
reflections on history, but in order to connect those reflections to the personal
time of memory and expectation. This connection becomes most explicit
when Guy Mannering returns to Ellangowan after an absence of sixteen years.
In the interim a great deal has changed both in his life and at Ellangowan: his
marriage to “Sophia” has involved him in a maze of jealousy and guilt, and
Ellangowan is up for sale to cover its owner’s debts.
After a pleasant ride of about an hour, the old towers of the ruin presented
themselves in the landscape. The thoughts, with what different feelings he
had lost sight of them so many years before, thronged upon the mind of the
46Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
traveller. The landscape was the same, but how changed, the feelings, hopes,
and views, of the spectator! Then, life and love were new, and all the prospect
was gilded by their rays. And now, disappointed in affection, sated with fame,
and what the world calls success, his mind goaded by bitter and repentant
recollection, his best hope was to find a retirement in which he might nurse
the melancholy that was to accompany him to his grave. “Yet why should
an individual mourn over the instability of his hopes, and the vanity of his
prospects? The ancient chiefs, who erected these enormous and massive
towers to be the fortress of their race and the seat of their power, could they
have dreamed the day was to come, when the last of their descendants should
be expelled, a ruined wanderer, from his possessions!”63
The overt Johnsonian moral of this meditation is not of great significance to
the novel. The young Mannering saw “ancient grandeur” in Ellangowan Auld
Place because of his own ambitions; the middle-aged Mannering now sees
the vanity of human wishes because of his own regrets. But the novel doesn’t
dwell at length on either theme. What the novel does dwell on, with sustained
fascination, is a subtler analogy between Mannering’s subjective sense of time
and the historical time manifested in Ellangowan. Both experiences of time
entail a certain blindness, related to a pun used twice in the passage above. As
Mannering passes through different stages of life, his changing “prospects”
are reflected in the “prospect” (i.e., landscape) he sees, so that he cannot now
perceive the same Ellangowan he saw sixteen years earlier. In a similar way, the
“ancient chiefs” who built the Auld Place could not “have dreamed” of their
descendant’s fate, because their experience gave them no way to imagine the
modern legal and financial chicaneries that have reduced Godfrey Bertram to
poverty. Mannering reflects on their blindness as if it offered a sort of Stoic
consolation for his own, but the narrative pleasure of the analogy between his
experience and theirs has little to do with stoicism. Instead the reader is being
set up for a moment when both forms of blindness (personal and historical)
will be overcome at once.
Although the perspective that overcomes these limitations belongs
ultimately to the reader, characters do intermittently share it. Guy Mannering,
like most of Scott’s novels, exploits a historical form of dramatic irony by using
social context to reveal a significance in actions that is hidden from the actors
themselves. Scott’s capsule history of the Bertram family allows his readers to
see, for instance, how the material pressures on a particular class of Scottish
gentry tempt Godfrey Bertram to complete his family’s destruction in the very
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
47
act of trying to reassert their gentility. Bertram knows the same facts, but he is
too deeply embedded in them to grasp their significance. In episodes such as
this, the pleasures of historical perspective depend on the reader’s superiority
to a character’s limited point of view. But at other moments, Scott’s characters
briefly become the vehicles of historical perspective rather than its victims.
While traveling to meet Julia Mannering, Harry Bertram happens to step
ashore at Ellangowan Auld Place, and “unconscious as the most absolute
stranger,” wanders through the estate that belonged to his ancestors and would
belong to him now, if he knew his own identity. His response to the ruins
develops into a moment of self-estrangement that is also self-recognition.
“And the powerful barons who owned this blazonry,” thought Bertram,
pursuing the usual train of ideas which flows upon the mind at such scenes,—
“do their posterity continue to possess the lands which they had laboured to
fortify so strongly? or are they wanderers, ignorant perhaps even of the fame
or power of their forefathers, while their hereditary possessions are owned
by a race of strangers? Why is it,” he thought, continuing to follow out the
succession of ideas which the scene prompted, “why is it that some scenes
awaken thoughts, which belong as it were to dreams of early and shadowy
recollection, such as my old Brahmin Moonshie would have ascribed to a state
of previous existence? Is it the visions of our sleep that float confusedly in
our memory, and are recalled by the appearance of such real objects as in any
respect correspond to the phantoms they presented to our imagination? How
often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet
feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither
the scene, nor the speakers, nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we
could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place. It
is even so with me while I gaze upon that ruin. . . .64
This gleam of recollection amid the ruins leads Bertram to suspect that
the scene may “have been familiar to me in infancy,” a revelation that is
immediately followed by a confrontation with the usurper Glossin that sets
the novel’s denouement in motion. The revelation of Bertram’s past and the
recovery of his rights may thus appear to be catalyzed by the antiquity of
property—rather as Adeline, in The Romance of the Forest, discovers her own
familial past in the bowels of a ruined abbey. But though Guy Mannering does
loosely echo that Radcliffean plot, the novel seems at the same time to deflate
its implications. Bertram’s initial responses to Ellangowan are framed by the
same sort of wry observation that undermines ruin sentiment elsewhere in the
48Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
novel: they are “the usual train of ideas which flows upon the mind at such
scenes.” Bertram’s train of ideas becomes interesting only when it takes an
oddly subjective detour into speculations about reincarnation, anamnesis, and
(what would later be called) déjà vu.65 The dramatic emphasis falls not, as in
Radcliffe, on the ruin and the ancient artifacts it contains, but on a mysterious
connection between the ruin and Bertram’s subjective experience of time.
This connection repeats, but reverses, the connection between personal and
historical time established earlier by the middle-aged Mannering. In both
scenes, a character gazing on the Auld Place meditates on the “ancient chiefs”
who built it. But where Mannering had compared the blindness of youth to
the blindness we all share as creatures with a historically limited imagination,
Bertram transforms personal amnesia into historical vision—using a dizzying
moment of personal déjà vu to overcome his own (dramatically ironized)
ignorance “of the fame and power of [his] forefathers.”
There is a strong analogy between this turning point in Guy Mannering
and the climactic homecoming scene in O’Donnel. Both scenes focus on a
character’s dawning recognition of his own ignorance; Colonel O’Donnel
reviews his life, after all, by focusing on the different kinds of blindness
that have colored his three departures from home—“when each time, as
he thought, he was never to behold it more.” In both novels, the return to
an ancestral home is important, not because the home itself bears legible
historical traces, but because it awakens a temporal vertigo that allows the
protagonist to glimpse the shadowy historical backdrop of his life. The setting
is not irrelevant: these scenes are staged as moments of homecoming because
landed property still has the power to evoke collective time. But Regency novels
are not willing to take the time contained in property quite as seriously as
Radcliffe had done; they treat it merely as a convenient occasion to dramatize
another sort of time located in the protagonist’s mind. This inward sense
of time remains as dim and obscure, however, as any of Radcliffe’s Gothic
interiors. Although Colonel O’Donnel’s life tacitly recapitulates O’Donnel’s
history of Ireland, he never directly articulates the parallel, and the point of
the parallel is in any case to emphasize the Irish gentry’s tragic inability to
grasp the historical circumstances that have shaped their fate. Harry Bertram
rhapsodizes in general terms about human blindness to history (“are they
wanderers, ignorant perhaps even of the fame or power of their forefathers
. . . ?”)—reflections that acquire an added ironic edge since the blindness he is
meditating on turns out to be his own.
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
49
Scott and Morgan admittedly dramatize the theme of amnesia in
different ways. In Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, Scott’s protagonists
are foundlings who have literally forgotten their own past and parentage.
Morgan produces an analogous effect by allowing her protagonists to travel
incognito; although the protagonist’s true identity, and connection to
national history, are concealed from other characters (and from the reader),
the protagonist will eventually turn out to have known or suspected the truth
all along. The absence of literal “amnesia” in Morgan’s novels does not make
their representation of history less subjective: the protagonists of O’Donnel
and Florence Macarthy may remember their own names, but their struggle
to document and comprehend the past still has the effect of dramatizing
social continuity as a subjective mystery, especially since their knowledge is
largely concealed from the reader. But the protagonist’s concealed knowledge
does signal a difference of tone. Morgan’s characters remember their own
names, and Scott’s don’t, because Scott is interested in mining the dramatic
irony of their ignorance. The theme of historical amnesia evokes a mixture
of sublimity and satire in both authors, but Morgan tends to emphasize the
sublimity, where Scott pushes the theme in a satirical direction.
This divergence of tone may be related to the political differences that
separated the two authors. Although both are fascinated by human beings’
limited ability to understand the systems in which they are placed, this
fascination has a more immediately polemical point for Scott because of his
conservatism. Many of Scott’s dramatic ironies can be understood as glosses
on Edmund Burke’s warning against political innovation:
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming
it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it
a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science; because the
real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the
first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation; and its
excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The
reverse also happens [. . .]. In states there are often some obscure and almost
latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a
very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend.66
Just to stay with Guy Mannering, for instance, when Godfrey Bertram’s zeal to
expel gypsies and smugglers impoverishes the life of the local cottagers, and
leads indirectly to the abduction of his child, Scott’s narrator underlines an
explicitly Burkean moral: “Even an admitted nuisance, of ancient standing,
50Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
should not be abated without some caution.”67 Morgan is equally fascinated
by the limits of human knowledge, but because she is less interested in
drawing a Burkean moral of humility, her characters don’t have to be victims
of dramatic irony: they are often allowed to understand and embrace the
mystery of their own limited perspective. In Florence Macarthy, for instance,
one of General Fitzwalter’s companions sneers at nationalism by pointing out
that the idea of nationality gets its power from the pitifully restricted sphere of
human experience. “[A]ll countries are alike: little masses of earth and water;
where some swarms of human ants are destined to creep through their span
of ephemeral existence; coming, they know not whence;—going, they know
not where.” Fitzwalter responds by embracing the sublimity of conscious
limitation: “These little masses of earth and water . . . are therefore precious
and important to the ants that creep on them; and each little hill is dear to the
swarm that inhabits it, as much from that very ignorance as from interest.”68
For some purposes, the contrast between Morgan’s “romantic” attempt
to make limitation self-conscious and Scott’s “realist” decision to enact it
through irony will matter more than the assumptions the two authors share.
This chapter began by describing the battle-scenes that Stendhal and Tolstoy
famously use to dramatize history’s invisibility. Those scenes resemble Scott
more closely than they resemble anything in Morgan precisely because they
share Scott’s reliance on dramatic irony. This is not necessarily a sign that,
say, Stendhal shared Scott’s conservatism; by the middle of the nineteenth
century, this sort of irony pointed less to the hubris of the French Revolution
in particular than to a broader epistemological agenda. Novelists like Stendhal
and George Eliot use the ironic distances that separate their characters’
perspective from the narrator to dramatize the way human consciousness is
always colored by a local historical situation, while nevertheless holding out
the possibility that we can free ourselves from that situation sufficiently to
comprehend other circumstances and cultures. As Harry Shaw has argued,
the paradox implicit in making both claims at once would become troubling
only if the characters’ limitation and the narrator’s omniscience were both
imagined as absolute; whereas in practice, novelists like Scott and Eliot
imagine the narrator’s broadened sympathies as a “regulative ideal.”69 Indeed,
one could argue that this is why realists often chose to enact a broadened
perspective in narrative rather than embodying it as an attribute of character:
it allowed them to avoid representing historical understanding as a state that
could be fully and finally achieved.
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
51
Where narrative technique is concerned, in short, Scott’s connection to
nineteenth-century realism may matter more than the parallels that link him
to Lady Morgan. This would be true especially if we were concerned to evaluate
technique; for although Scott and Morgan share some of the same historicist
insights, Scott’s ironic narration probably enacts the situated character of
human knowledge more effectively, and less paradoxically, than Morgan’s
attempt to represent that limitation as self-conscious ignorance. Here,
however, I’m less interested in evaluating technique than in understanding
the social tensions that gave these insights a pointed significance in the early
nineteenth century. How could such abstract themes (the historically-situated
character of knowledge, and the blindness it entails) become compelling
enough to organize a whole genre of popular narrative? Here, I think, is where
the parallels between Scott and Morgan become illuminating. For although
their novels reflect different conscious politics, and different approaches to
narrative craft, they are driven by very similar kinds of social wish-fulfillment,
especially in the period between  and .
I have already suggested that one of the functions of historical amnesia is
to allow the status once possessed by the landed gentry to be (re)discovered
in and through the genteel professions, with a bit of help from historical
cultivation. But the premise of amnesia also produces a strange sort of status
that elevates characters without defining their social station. The anonymity
of the protagonists in these novels is not just a suspenseful veil that heightens
the pleasure of the final revelation, but an integral part of the peculiar
distinction these novels are concerned to celebrate. I have already mentioned
that Lady Morgan’s later heroines are elevated above other characters by their
superior powers of mobility and masquerade: because they can impersonate
any rank and religion, it seems impossible to pin them down to a specific
place in Ireland’s social hierarchy. In reality, of course, this flexibility depends
on a determinate possession, which we might call cultural capital. When
Morgan’s heroines finally cast off their masks, they turn out to be people who
make their living from culture—as reforming educators, or even writers of
national tales. The social ambiguity of Scott’s characters is similarly linked
to cultivation. When we first meet Harry Bertram, the narrator notes that
“His dress is so plain and simple that it indicates nothing as to rank—it may
be that of a gentleman who travels in this manner for his pleasure, or of an
inferior person of whom it is the proper and usual garb.” Though the narrator
goes on to note that he carries “a volume of Shakespeare in each pocket,” the
52Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
point of this detail is not to resolve the mystery of Harry’s rank but to hint
that literary culture underwrites his transcendence of the rank system.70
I would suggest, in short, that the appeal of “historical amnesia” comes
from its power to dramatize cultural distinction as a free-floating mode of
distinction, perpendicular to ordinary classifications of rank. The protagonist’s
origins are concealed in order to take title and property (temporarily) out
of the equation, focusing attention instead on signs of personal cultivation.
Culture confers prestige in part by connecting its possessor to the collective
past, so these characters are shown to be readers of old chronicles and
letters, or Shakespeare and Spenser. But the characters also share much of
the reader’s ignorance about their own connection to national history. Scott’s
characters are victims of dramatic irony, and even Morgan’s remain mystified
by the parallels that link their lives to ancestral precedent. These blind spots
prevent historical cultivation from becoming a a fixed and limited possession;
it connects the protagonist to the past, without permitting her to grasp or
appropriate the connection. This flaw, which makes historical cultivation a
perpetually unfinished project, also prevents it from dwindling, like fashion,
to become one mark of status among many others. Historical cultivation
can appear to transcend the rank system because it depends on a vertiginous
glimpse of the past—what Keats will call a “wild surmise”—rather than a list
of specifiable knowledge.
Although the conceit of historical amnesia represents culture as a classless
principle, the idea that a classless mode of distinction could transcend existing
barriers of rank was a fantasy likely to appeal, in practice, to the middle classes.
The special relevance of historical cultivation to the middle ranks of life is
dramatized with particular clarity by a dream in Scott’s Antiquary. Because
none of the characters involved know all of the relevant facts, the dream’s
full significance remains accessible only to the reader. This is possible in part
because the role of protagonist is shared, in The Antiquary, by two people.
The young military officer who is traveling under the assumed name of Lovel
ought to be the protagonist, if youth, unrequited passion for a young woman
above his station, and a name that evokes “love” and “novel” at once count as
any qualification for that role. But Jonathan Oldbuck, the titular antiquary,
spends more time on stage. Biographical evidence has led many critics to
conclude that Oldbuck is partly a caricature of Scott’s own passions—from
his enthusiasm for the obscurer details of local history to the tragically
disappointed love that hovers in his past (which may echo Scott’s own rejection
Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
53
by Williamina Forbes).71 Since the story of love opposed by barriers of rank
is repeated in the lives of both Lovel and Oldbuck, it seems likely that the
divided protagonist of The Antiquary is Scott’s way of composing a portrait
of the artist as a young man and a sagely disappointed old one at once. In any
case, sentiment and symbolism are certainly heightened whenever the novel
explores a parallel between Lovel’s life and Oldbuck’s.
These parallels are displayed particularly in the Green Room, a rarelyused chamber of Oldbuck’s house which is hung with tapestries, and supposed
to be haunted by the ghost of his sixteenth-century Flemish ancestor, the
printer Aldobrand Oldbuck. For Jonathan Oldbuck, the room is haunted
more compellingly by memories of his lost love, Eveline Neville, who chose
passages from Chaucer that the young Oldbuck caused to be embroidered
on the borders of the room’s ancient tapestries. Eveline, unfortunately, chose
to marry an earl, and Oldbuck became an unmarried misogynist. Toward
the end of the novel’s first volume, Lovel visits Oldbuck and spends a night
in the Green Room. The tapestries come alive as he sleeps, and he sees
(presumably in a dream, though the visionary quality of the dream makes
this ambiguous) a fur-capped Flemish bourgeois who points to an unknown
foreign phrase in a book. The next morning he seems to recognize the same
phrase when Jonathan Oldbuck points to Aldobrand’s motto on the title page
of an Augsburg Confession. The motto, “Kunst macht Gunst,” or “skill wins
favour,” is explained as an emblem of Aldobrand’s “independence and selfreliance, which scorned to owe anything to patronage, that was not earned
by desert.” The printer’s self-reliance won him both economic success and
the hand of the fair Bertha, even though that hand was also sought by several
“half-starved sprigs of nobility.”72 It thus turns out that the ancient Flemish
printer and the young British officer are linked as middle-class professional
men confident that they have entered an era when skill (rather than noble
descent) will win favor—though the intervening disappointment of Jonathan
Oldbuck does shadow that faith with a certain cynicism. In the closing pages
of the novel Lovel will turn out to be the Honorable William Geraldin, the
long-lost son of an earl. But since his character in no way resembles his
(proud, gloomy, Catholic) father, this discovery has the effect of a promotion
rather than a revelation of class identity. When Lovel finally marries Isabella
Wardour, the wedding ring is given not by any of his biological relatives, but
by Jonathan Oldbuck, and it bears the legend “Kunst macht Gunst.”73
The theme of middle-class meritocratic aspiration was by no means a new
54Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819
one. But there is something novel about Scott’s decision to represent middleclass self-reliance as an ancestral legacy transmitted by dreams in an old
haunted chamber. The point of self-reliance, for William Godwin and other
bourgeois radicals of the s, had been to liberate the individual from the
dead hand of hereditary rank. The Antiquary takes up the theme in order
to transform the idea of meritocracy itself into a new kind of inheritance.
Aldobrand’s self-reliance matters precisely because Lovel can inherit it from
the distant past—although the heritage is mediated by cultural symbols
(Flemish tapestries, passages from Chaucer, the history of printing) and not
by real property or biological descent. The permanence of the estate has been
displaced by a cultural model of collective time, dependent on the old books
that give Aldobrand Oldbuck his last name. But the mediation of those books
through an ambiguously visionary (or haunted) dream of sixteenth-century
Flanders should remind us that this cultural model of time borrows its
grandeur from the same sort of discontinuity that darkened Radcliffe’s halfruined and stylistically-incoherent edifices. Regency-era novelists imagine
historical cultivation, not as a character’s induction into unbroken tradition,
but as a discovery of the contrasts, gaps, and perspectival dilemmas that make
it difficult to grasp one’s connection to the past.
2
The Invention of Historical Perspective
I
that the national tales and historical novels of the
Regency era celebrate historical cultivation in an interestingly indirect way. Although the protagonists of these novels are often addicted to reading about the past, their consciousness of history is dramatized most forcefully as blindness—when they forget, overlook, or only belatedly recognize
the historical parallels and contrasts that define their own lives. The point of
this blindness to history is not simply to generate irony. In these novels, an
unconscious connection to history renders characters more impressive, implying that they possess the authority of the past in a free-floating form that
doesn’t depend on ownership of property or determinate signs of social rank.
In this way, the prestige of historical cultivation comes to depend on the very
problems of perspective and scale that make it difficult for subjects to perceive
historical change.
Before broadening this argument into a general claim about romantic
historicism, I need to confront an obvious question: How far does it really
apply beyond the novel? In fiction, the formal centrality of suspense requires
protagonists to misunderstand a great deal at the beginning of a story. It is
perhaps not surprising, then, that blindness to history should be a central
theme of historical fiction. Before concluding that the necessary imperfection
of historical knowledge had actually become integral to its social authority,
we might want to ask whether the sublime paradoxes that darkened Regencyera fiction also held the same sort of value outside the covers of a novel. When
h av e a r g u ed
55
56The Invention of Historical Perspective
early-nineteenth-century readers opened a volume of history—or simply read
old books—how did they understand the cultivation they were acquiring? In
particular, how did they balance the prestige of skeptical self-consciousness
against the value of positive knowledge?
One of the chief ways we reconcile these aspects of cultivation today is
by leaning on the metaphor of “historical perspective.” The metaphor of
perspective improves on older metaphors like “breadth” by evoking the
limitations of visual experience. Knowledge is unavoidably limited, just as an
observer’s position necessarily distorts scale with foreshortening and hides
some parts of the scene behind others. But as the phrase is familiarly used,
to see things “in perspective” is also to set them in their correct proportions
and relations—by analogy to the kind of correctness that pertains in visual
art, where artists strive deliberately to reproduce the distorting effect of a
single vantage-point. Talking about historical perspective is thus a convenient
way of acknowledging that historical knowledge is situated and limited while
simultaneously insisting that a limited form of knowledge can reveal a deeper
truth. It’s not always clear whether the historical observer’s imagined vantage
point(s) are located in the past or in the present. A recent manual designed
to shape historical education in elementary and middle schools, for instance,
advises teachers that “comparative world history helps develop historical
perspective.” Here students seem to be contrasting different parts of the past
from a single vantage point in the present. But the same manual stresses
that “historical perspective helps students develop a broader view of current
controversies”—which seems to imply that students imaginatively adopt
various standpoints in the past in order to view the present from different
angles.1 In short, the metaphor of “historical perspective” doesn’t prescribe
a perspective with much specificity. It more vaguely implies that the value
of historical education depends on the very thing that might appear to be its
weakness—the fact that a given subject will look radically different depending
on one’s vantage point.
I’ll argue that this way of imagining the value of history can be traced
back to the end of the eighteenth century. I don’t mean simply that writers
rely on perspectival metaphors to characterize historical reading. They do, but
I’m less interested in the visual metaphor itself than in the implications that
cluster around it—especially the implication that the benefits of historical
study are somehow bound up with the inherent limitations of historical
knowledge. I’ll examine late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century texts
The Invention of Historical Perspective
57
that combine a vivid consciousness of the reader’s cognitive confinement
in the present with an ambitiously comparative project for history, so that
historical consciousness is dramatized as a tension between the determinate
present moment and the multiplicity of vanished possibilities that shadow it.
My examples will be drawn from works of history, but also from essays about
the study of history, and from poems that dramatize historical consciousness.
I’m less concerned to describe genres of historical writing as such than
to explain changes in the perceived social value of history. I’ll argue that
romantic writers began to represent historical consciousness as a struggle
between singleness and multiplicity in order to dramatize the boundary
between historical cultivation and other forms of social distinction.
Teaching Readers to Take the Long View
Living in an age when historical publications are divided between
specialized academic research and broader works for a general audience, it
may be difficult to imagine that readers of history ever had to be encouraged
to adopt a generalizing, comparative approach. But in the late eighteenth
century, the tensions between writers and readers of history were differently
organized. A genre of writing that had often amounted to a narrative of
military and political events was expanding to encompass a broader range of
social material, including commerce, the arts, and manners.2 As Ann Rigney
has shown, the introduction of this new material often strained the narrative
framework readers expected.3 At the same time, the audience for history was
expanding; the period sees a proliferation of abridgments, summaries, and
“manuals of universal history” designed for middle-class readers who needed
general orientation in the world more than they needed a refresher course on
leadership from Plutarch. The traditional justification for historical study—
which had represented history above all as a storehouse of examples of civic
virtue—did a poor job of describing the reading practices that suited these
new genres and audiences.4
In this context, historians seem to have found it necessary to lecture their
readers about the importance of abstracting, generalizing, and comparing.
The point of these lectures may not actually have been to create new reading
practices, but to justify emerging practices not yet consecrated by tradition. In
any event, the new emphasis on a comparative rationale for history flourishes
toward the downmarket end of the historical genre: in one-volume works of
58The Invention of Historical Perspective
universal history, handbooks of chronology, and lectures explicitly aimed
at a middle-class audience. Beginning roughly in the s, these kinds of
works advance a new justification of history, not as a collection of exemplary
political models, but as a mode of imagination that readers have to use in
order to envision society as a whole, or indeed to access any aspect of social
life outside the scope of their own immediate experience.
Although we now think of Joseph Priestley as a scientist more than a
historian, he played a significant role in defining and popularizing this model
of historical cultivation, both through his Lectures on History and through his
celebrated and very widely imitated Charts of biography and history. Priestley’s
definition of history does not focus on political wisdom. For Priestley, “every
thing comes under the denomination of history, which informs us of any
fact which is too remote in time, or place, to be the subject of our personal
knowledge.”5 This strikingly broad definition includes much that we might
call “current events,” as well as the cultural and economic life of the past.
The point of studying history is not specifically to emulate leaders, but simply
to get a “full length” view of the world that would otherwise necessarily
elude us. Priestley’s account of the value of history thus turns out to hinge on
skepticism: he has to explain why ordinary daily experience inevitably fails to
provide a comprehensive view of the world.
[T]he examples which history presents to us are generally complete. The whole
is before us. We see things at full length, as we may say. . . . Whereas in real life
every scene opens very slowly; we see therefore but a very small part of a thing
at one time, and are consequently liable to be deceived into a very fallacious
judgment of it; particularly considering how distorted even those imperfect
views of things are by the relation of every thing to self, which it is impossible
to keep out of sight in things in which we ourselves are concerned.6
History, in short, has the task of counteracting the distorting effects of
temporal proximity and self-interest. For that reason, Priestley concludes, it
“is calculated for the use of persons of both sexes, and of men of all ranks, and
all professions in life.”7 In fact, this rationale for historical study might seem
especially calculated for the middle ranks of life, inasmuch as it counters the
narrowing effect of self-interest that was sometimes felt to make commercial
professions incompatible with public virtue.
Since history has the task of integrating experience that would otherwise
be atomized, it is for Priestley essentially a comparative project. It requires
The Invention of Historical Perspective
59
“that the experience of some ages should be collected and compared, that
distant events should be brought together; and so the first rise, entire progress,
and final conclusion of schemes, transactions, and characters, should be seen,
as it were, in one unbroken view, with all their connexions and relations.”8
Priestley’s tendency to imagine historical understanding as a process of
visual unification—which brings “distant events” together “in one unbroken
view”—is dramatized in a particularly concrete way by his affection for
historical timelines. Although Priestley wasn’t the first person to make use of
them, timelines were a relatively recent invention, which Daniel Rosenberg has
dated to the s. As Rosenberg also stresses, Priestley’s Chart of Biography
() and New Chart of History (; see Fig. 1 overleaf) were “the most
influential timelines of the eighteenth century,” going through twenty editions
and spawning imitations in England, Germany, and France. Indeed, “in the
 statement of the Royal Society of London marking Priestley’s induction, it
is his Chart of Biography rather than his scientific work that is mentioned.”9
Both charts compress world chronology into poster-sized visual aids. The
horizontal axis represents time while the vertical axis is divided by area of
expertise (in the Chart of Biography) or region of the globe (in the Chart of
History). The space thereby defined is filled with line segments representing
individual lives (in the Chart of Biography) or colored areas representing the
sway of empires (in the Chart of History). Comparative conclusions that would
be difficult for an individual reader to deduce become visible at a glance:
it’s the work of a moment to grasp the relative duration of the Roman and
Persian Empires. Priestley’s charts define a newly ambitious goal of synoptic
and immediate historical comprehension. But it would be just as accurate to
say that they reflect a new self-consciousness about the imaginative obstacles
that prevent readers of history from grasping what they read. If, as Priestley
suggests, “we have no distinct idea of length of time, until we have conceived
it in the form of some sensible thing that has length, as of a line,” then
historical time is difficult to imagine, and no reader can have grasped it very
distinctly before the timeline was invented. Nor was Priestley entirely satisfied
with his own solution. He spends several pages describing the reasons for the
“necessary imperfection” of his chart, including the problem that “extensive
empires cannot be represented by contiguous spaces,” and that it “can by no
means give a just idea of the largeness of empires.”10
In short, Priestley popularized something more influential than a new
visual aid for studying history: he popularized a new topic for readers of
Fig. 1. Joseph Priestley, A New Chart of History (London: J. Johnson, 1769).
Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.
62The Invention of Historical Perspective
history to worry about. It was no longer sufficient to learn important dates, or
draw lessons from the lives of notable men; one also had to get an immediate
impression of the shape of history as a whole. I describe this as something to
“worry about,” because Priestley represents it as a challenge for the human
imagination. But it was also clearly something to boast about, and especially
something for writers of historical manuals and abridgments to boast about.
The incompleteness of a brief summary was no longer necessarily a makeshift;
it could be understood as a deliberate strategy for rendering significant
patterns visible, and thereby producing the right sort of historical cultivation.
In fact, the incompleteness of the historical record itself could be seen as a
good thing, inasmuch as it reduced history to a manageable size. Several
late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historical manuals begin
with this reflection, including John Bigland’s Letters on the Study and Use of
Ancient and Modern History (). Bigland explains that it’s possible to write
universal history only because most of the events that have been preserved are
not worth remembering, and most of the events that are worth remembering
have not been preserved.
To comprise a history of the world, in a work of so limited an extent, would
appear a ridiculous attempt; and yet, perhaps, so much as is worth retaining
in the memory might be brought within a narrow compass. The most
uninteresting narratives of battles and sieges, of desolation and carnage, a
thousand times repeated . . . may amuse vulgar minds, but can afford little
entertainment to an intelligent reader, whose ideas are more enlarged, and
who desires to form a comprehensive view of things. The inquisitive mind,
desirous of drawing a true picture of human existence, contemplates the origin
and progress of the arts and sciences, of systems and opinions, of civilization
and commerce. . . . The details of those important affairs, are either totally
wanting in the records of past ages, or obscure and uncertain. No more than
general views can therefore be obtained.
Bigland is less concerned to advise historians than to explain how history
should shape the reader’s mind. Readers who want to be “intelligent” rather
than “vulgar” will seek “to form a comprehensive view of things.” In order to
do so, he goes on to explain, they need to be selective and contrastive, focusing
not on details but on “the causes which influence and direct the opinions and
conduct of men, in different ages, in different countries, in different situations
of life, and under different political and religious establishments.”11
This rhetoric is certainly, among other things, a way of reassuring readers
The Invention of Historical Perspective
63
that they don’t need to buy a longer book. But it also offers the process of
summary and abridgment quite seriously as a model of the formation of
historical consciousness. During the Napoleonic Wars, discourse about
the necessity of abridging history often took the special form of bemused
reflection on the excessive eventfulness of recent decades—for instance in
Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Dialogue in the Shades,” where Clio complains to
Mercury that she has “had more business for these last twenty years than I
have often had for two centuries,” and proposes to make room on her scroll
by “striking off some hundreds of names,” mainly at the “mouldy” end of
the roll. Barbauld’s dialogue produces obvious effects of amusement and
horror—horror because Clio is clear that her “business” has consisted largely
in counting, e.g., “two hundred and thirteen thousand human bodies and
ninety-five thousand horses that lie stiff, frozen, and unburied on the banks
of the Berecina.”12 But as various historical figures petition Clio to keep their
places on the scroll, the dialogue also has the less obvious effect of dramatizing
historical consciousness as a process of judicious selection and subtraction.
This implication (latent in Barbauld’s dialogue) is more overt in Hester Lynch
Piozzi’s two-volume abridgment of world history, Retrospection (). Piozzi
defends abridgment as a necessity in “disturbed and busy days” when “young
people are called out to act before they know.” But she distinguishes her mode
of abridgment from “fashionable extracts . . . where no one thing having any
reference to another thing, each loses much of its effect by standing completely
insulated from all the rest.” By contrast
Our Work, though but a frontispiece and ruin, contains between [each
selection] some shaded drawings, such as we find in rudiments of painting,
and will, like them, be good for young beginners. Perhaps, too, those who
long ago have read, and long ago desisted from reading histories well-known,
may like to please their fancies with the Retrospect of what they feel connected
in their minds with youthful study [. . .].13
The metaphor of “retrospection,” which recurs throughout the book, does
two things for Piozzi. First, by evoking personal memory it focuses attention
on the reader, and makes clear that Retrospection will be less concerned to
record details than to form historical consciousness. At the same time,
Piozzi’s reference to “rudiments of painting” and “shaded drawings” suggests
that she is conscious of the visual metaphor built into the etymology of
“retrospect.” And her emphasis on the necessity of relating each part of
64The Invention of Historical Perspective
history to the rest suggests that the point of the visual metaphor for her, as for
Priestley, is to stress the essentially relational, comparative nature of historical
consciousness.
The Historical Catalog Poem
Some puzzling categories of romantic-era poetry begin to make more
sense if they’re understood as ways of dramatizing historical cultivation of the
kind Priestley had promoted, which relies on condensation and contrast in
order to generate an immediate impression of the shape of history as a whole.
This seems, in fact, to be the central purpose of a minor subgenre of romantic
lyrics, which might be called “historical catalog poems.” As lyrics devoted
to historical meditation, these poems are clearly related to an older sort of
lyric that took ruins and monuments as prompts for reflection. But in the
catalog poem, the ruin is missing. The speaker gazes not at Stonehenge but
at a natural phenomenon (the moon, sun, or sea will do nicely). The poem is
set in motion, not by the mute appeal of crumbling stone, but by an illusion
of natural timelessness that collapses when the speaker finds herself thinking
about the many different civilizations who also gazed or sailed across, say,
the sea. If the ruin poem contained an implicit boast about travel, the catalog
poem implicitly boasts a historicist consciousness that has learned to see the
past as present in the most unlikely places. We can call this boast not just
“historical” but “historicist,” because the form of the genre implies that each
civilization in fact sees something slightly different: history alters and inflects
even the eternal forms of nature.
“A Hymn of the Night” (), by the collaborative authors William and
Mary Howitt, is a late but perfect example of the genre. In form the poem
is basically an ode, composed of five fourteen-line stanzas. It begins by
apostrophizing the moon, asking her to reveal “All she has seen and all she
now surveys / And how the young earth looked in her primeval days.” The
next two stanzas speculate about long-vanished people who gazed at the moon
in different ways. The moon was the first thing to meet Eve’s eyes in Eden; it
was studied by Chaldean shepherds and worshipped by Egyptian priestesses.
At the end of the third stanza the speaker shifts into imperative mood, still
addressing the moon:
Oh, call back from thy memory’s treasury all
Thou hast beheld;—wake kingdoms past away;
The Invention of Historical Perspective
65
Image forth deeds of wonder, and recall
The great ones of the earth from dark decay.
This is followed by a catalog of various historic or prehistoric figures who
deserve to be reanimated: “prophets and kings,” the inventors of arts and
agriculture, and “the blind father of the lyre.” Finally, the speaker asks the
moon to reveal “the Elysian lands that lie / In their unknown-of quiet”—
hidden spots of the present-day map unmarked by “passion’s tumult.” The
poem ends with the realization that this is a vain request. “No spot / Of
unknown lands thou seest where man has left no blot.”14
One of the striking ways this poem differs from the tradition of ruin
poetry is by refusing to articulate a vanitas theme. Since the poem contains
no crumbling monuments, there is no obvious prompt for reflection on the
vanity of earthly immortality. But the poem’s response to that theme is not
just to omit but to reverse it. The darkly knowing final lines seem to fill the
emotional place that would once have been occupied by meditation on the
frailty of earthly memory and the vanity of fame. But instead of concluding
that earthly achievements fade, leaving no trace behind, the poem suggests
that they leave only too many traces. There is “no spot” on the globe left
unblotted by the history of human passion. While this observation is delivered
as if it were somehow sobering, the rhetoric of reanimation elsewhere in the
poem makes it look suspiciously like wish-fulfillment. “A Hymn of the Night”
seems to promise that the past can never be wholly lost, since it remains latent
even in something as generic as moonlight. It is thus really possible, at least
imaginatively, to “recall / The great ones of the earth from dark decay.”
This strangely earnest treatment of earthly immortality is central to many
historical catalog poems. It is particularly insistent, for instance, in Felicia
Hemans. The five lyrics she wrote that fit most clearly into the “historical
catalog” genre—“The Treasures of the Deep,” “The Voice of the Wind,”
“The Magic Glass,” “The Departed,” and “Communings with Thought”—
all emphasize the speaker’s curatorial relationship to the memory of the
dead. Several of the poems use that sentimental premise as a springboard
for fantasies of physical resurrection. “The Treasures of the Deep” (),
for instance, surveys various forms of human achievement swallowed up by
the sea (treasure-bearing “Argosies,” “cities of a world gone by,” and modern
warships) before concluding “Earth shall reclaim her precious things from
thee! /—Restore the dead, thou sea!”15 In Victor Hugo’s “Slope of Reverie”
(), cities of the past similarly emerge from the soil and give up their
66The Invention of Historical Perspective
dead.16 In other authors, the invocation of immortality may be more oblique
or complex. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” isn’t, on the whole, a historical
catalog poem, but the seventh stanza does offer a sort of thumbnail sketch
of the genre, rapidly tracing a particular homesick longing from classical
(“emperor and clown”) to Biblical (“the sad heart of Ruth”) to romanticmedieval contexts (“faery lands forlorn”).17 Although a well-established
critical tradition informs us that the nightingale should be understood as a
figure for the immortality of art, it has never been entirely clear why Keats
finds it so easy, here and elsewhere, to conflate the “immortality” of art
with actual personal survival. It is even more difficult to understand where
Hemans and the Howitts get the poetic belief that the moon and sea could
“Restore the dead,” or the poetic confidence to so command them.
One way to approach this question would be to consider how the historicalcatalog poem (and related poetic gestures) are related to eighteenth-century
speculation about immortality. Consciousness of historical change posed a
problem for every kind of afterlife. Even in heaven, Thomas Burnet pointed
out, it was hard to imagine an afterlife that would preserve worldly community
in any meaningful way. What language would departed souls speak after
death? Would they be grouped together by nationality? And if so, “what is to
be done by us the inhabitants of this Island, who have had so many Languages
and so many Originals? Shall we speak Welsh in our aërial bodies, or Saxon, or
Norman, or as we do at this Day, a Mixture and Compound of them all?”18
Earthly fame was even less secure. The metaphor that inflated fame into
“immortality” was of course very old, but eighteenth-century philosophers
found that it would no longer bear much weight. When Diderot announced
that “posterity is, for the philosopher, what the other world is for the religious
man,” his correspondent Falconet was quick to point out that posterity made a
poor substitute for heaven. Posterity can only promise immortality to a select
few; writers have more reason to believe in it than their readers do. Moreover,
posthumous fame is vulnerable to accident and injustice.19 Edward Young’s
Night Thoughts highlighted a more fundamental problem: historical change
hollows out the significance of memory even when memory does survive. The
point is not just that monuments crumble, but that “Empires die: Where,
now, / The Roman? Greek? They stalk, an empty Name!” Shorn of its original
social context, fame has no human meaning.20
The speakers of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems are preoccupied by this
anxiety. They suspect that historical change will be so complete that it hollows
The Invention of Historical Perspective
67
out all the consolations of fame: stories will be forgotten and memorials will
have no meaning for a future generation living a radically different kind of life.
Unable to deny that fear, Macpherson inverts it to produce a strangely literal
fantasy of historical immortality. Ossianic characters imagine themselves as
voices carried on the wind, to be heard by men of “other years” who “admire
the chiefs of old, and the race that are no more.”21 Nagging suspicions about the
emptiness of outdated fame are transformed into an audible form of historical
difference that constitutes immortality. romantic-era critics developed a
similarly historicist model of immortality by distinguishing it from mere
contemporary “fame.” On one level the point of the distinction is that fame
has to be tested by time before we know its value. But the flip side of that claim
is often an acknowledgment that history changes the nature of fame and makes
its possessor unrecognizable to himself. “When we hear any one complaining
that he has not the same fame as some poet or painter who lived two hundred
years ago,” William Hazlitt observes, “he seems to us to complain that he has
not been dead these two hundred years.”22
The “immortality” envisioned in historical-catalog poems involves a
sea-change of this sort. It resembles the afterlife of Macpherson’s explicitly
dated ghosts, with the difference that Regency-era speakers tend to identify
with posterity rather than the ghosts themselves. This subjective dimension
of immortality (what one might call “immortality reception”) was already
prominent in Macpherson, since his heroes spent much of their time
communing with the ghosts of yet-older-heroes. It also dominated eighteenthcentury responses to Ossian: in Goethe’s Werther, for instance, Ossian’s poems
are represented as stories about visionary experience of the past.
What a world the magnificent poet carries me into! To wander across the
heath, with the storm-winds roaring about me, carrying the ghosts of
ancestors in steaming mists through the dim moonlight. To hear from the
mountains, amid the roar of the forest stream, the half-dispersed groaning of
the spirits from their caves.23
It isn’t difficult to see the continuity between Werther’s fantasy and a catalog
poem like Felicia Hemans’s “The Voice of the Wind” (), premised on the
conceit that the wind carries the sounds of vanished civilizations as they echo
down “the dark aisles of a thousand years.” The epigraph to “The Voice of the
Wind” (“There is nothing in the wide world so like the voice of a spirit”) is in
fact drawn from one of Thomas Gray’s letters on Ossian.24
68The Invention of Historical Perspective
In short, writers of historical catalog poems could ask the moon or sea to
reanimate the dead because they were drawing on a poetic tradition that had
resolved anxieties about historical change by representing consciousness of
historical difference, semi-playfully, as an ability to hear or see ghosts. The
last stanza of “The Voice of the Wind” illustrates the limits of the playfulness
involved fairly well.
Are all these notes in thee, wild Wind? these many notes in thee?
Far in our own unfathomed souls their fount must surely be;
Yes, buried, but unsleeping, there Thought watches, Memory lies,
From whose deep urn the tones are poured, through all Earth’s harmonies.25
The effect of this stanza is less to deflate the central conceit than to point
out that, on a psychological level, it’s meant seriously. Somehow the sounds
of the historic past (“the rollings of triumphant wheels, the harpings in the
hall / The far-off shout of multitudes”) are genuinely preserved in human
“Thought” and “Memory.”
To put this another way, although “The Voice of the Wind” is not
literally about ghosts, it is really about immortality. It illustrates Emile
Durkheim’s observation that the idea of immortality is powered less by
belief in personal survival than by identification with the permanence of
the group. The poem is not particularly interested in the personal survival
of the conquerors and harpers it describes, but it is concerned to show that
they are somehow collectively contained “in our own unfathomed souls” in
spite of time and change. Of course, as the word “unfathomed” may hint,
this fantasy of collective permanence also has a personal dimension: a soul
that can imaginatively contain the whole human past implicitly lays claim
to its own sort of boundlessness. In historical catalog poems, this promise of
immortality is explored figuratively, but it could also become quite literal—
for instance in the nineteenth-century “religions of humanity” advanced by
French thinkers like Auguste Comte, who gave identification with history a
sacramental character. Even in England, as Adam Potkay has recently shown,
writers like William Wordsworth and John Stuart Mill developed a theory of
“impersonal immortality” that hinged on the individual’s identification with
“the life of the community.”26
Identification of this kind required a consciousness of history very different
from the emulation of exemplary civic heroes that had been recommended
in the eighteenth century. In Felicia Hemans’s “Communings with Thought”
The Invention of Historical Perspective
69
(), for instance, the speaker urges her own thoughts to dwell on obscure
and forgotten corners of the past:
Go, visit cell and shrine!
Where woman hath endured!—through wrong, through scorn
Uncheer’d by fame, yet silently upborne
By promptings more divine!
In the poem’s closing stanzas, after a long catalog of historical scenes
that cannot be tied very precisely to names or dates, the freedom to range
imaginatively across time is equated to immortality.
Go, shoot the gulf of death!
Track the pure spirit where no chain can bind,
Where the heart’s boundless love its rest may find,
Where the storm sends no breath!
Higher, and yet more high!
Shake off the cumbering chain which earth would lay
On your victorious wings—mount, mount—your way
Is through eternity! 27
We already know that imagination can usurp the place of religious
transcendence in romantic lyric. The odd and interesting aspect of Hemans’s
poem has to do with the way it uses history to accomplish this. For while the
poem makes very strong claims about history’s power to elevate the mind, it
relies not at all on the traditional rationale for those claims, which was that
the reader of history will learn to emulate heroic figures, and draw maxims of
conduct from their example. In fact, since the figures in Hemans’s poem are
“uncheer’d by fame,” it is not clear that their stories have ever been recorded.
The speaker certainly doesn’t resemble the ideal reader of history from
Bolingbroke’s frequently reprinted Letters on the Study and Use of History. On
the contrary, she seems to be indulging the very “wantonness of curiosity”
that Bolingbroke warns against: her mind is elevated less through the content
of historical example than through the sheer diversity and range of historical
incident. 28 This mode of cultivation resembles the synoptic perspective
promoted by Priestley’s timelines and by romantic-era historical abridgment:
it invites identification with the bewildering diversity of the past, even at the
cost of some forgetfulness.
A loosely analogous logic governs several of Keats’s sonnets about the
70The Invention of Historical Perspective
difficulty of understanding Greek works of art. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”
(), for instance, spends most of its lines describing not the marbles but
the “dizzy pain” of apprehending them across a gulf that is at once historical
difference and the social marginality of a writer who cannot claim to have
visited Greece or know Greek. The speaker experiences cultural bafflement
as an acute consciousness of mortality: “each imagined pinnacle and steep
/ Of godlike hardship tells me I must die.” There is of course a backhanded
consolation in this line, since anyone struggling with “godlike hardship” has
already set one foot outside the limits of mortality. And when the marbles
themselves are finally described, at the end of the sonnet, they mingle
“Grecian grandeur” with a montage that looks oddly like the speaker’s own
dizzy consciousness of time, distance, and mortality: “the rude / Wasting of
old time—a billowy main— / A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.”29 In short,
it turns out that the only way to appreciate the grandeur of these ruined
marbles is to fail to understand them, because their grandeur is located not in
themselves but in the gulf of historical difference that separates them from the
present. The “indescribable feud” that deranges the speaker’s senses presses
his claim to possess a source of prestige now far more important than Greek
or the Grand Tour—an immediate experience of the alienation produced by
historical time.30
Although “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is not an historical catalog poem,
it does help explain why middle-class writers—like William and Mary Howitt,
or Felicia Hemans—might have been attracted to the catalog form. In Keats’s
sonnet, the speaker’s inability to appropriate objects of cultural prestige turns
out to be the true source of cultural prestige—a dizzy sense of temporal
distance that transcends all merely determinate signs of grandeur. Historical
catalog poems may not own up to the competitive dimension of culture quite
as candidly as Keats does, but they do dramatize cultural distinction in a
similar way: as a wide-ranging consciousness of difference that transcends
the trappings of prestige in any particular time or place. The form turns a
middle-class writer’s lack of worldly experience into a positive advantage,
since the fact that the speaker’s historical knowledge consists only of dim
intimations can be made to dramatize the very quality of indeterminacy that
makes culture superior to titles, property, and worldly fame.
The Invention of Historical Perspective
71
Historical Perspective as an Educational Doctrine
In late-eighteenth-century Britain, the idea that readers should construct
a mental model of the entire human past carried more weight in ad hoc
educational practice than it did in theory. While the authors of timelines
and abridged world histories celebrated the importance of contrast and
synthesis, writers in most other contexts continued to justify historical study
by invoking the exemplary value of individual characters and events. “To read
history properly” was still “to enquire into the characters of those we there
meet with, and to judge of them wisely and cautiously.”31
By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the relative importance of
different justifications had been largely inverted. When writers discuss the
value of history in the s, they mention the instructive force of historical
example only as an afterthought. The mere representation of vanished modes
of life is increasingly taken to be an end in itself, with a value that hardly needs
justification. Occasionally, writers do pause to justify it, as for instance in an
essay “On the Study of History,” published anonymously in a Scottish literary
annual in . (The author may have been John Wilson or J. G. Lockhart.)
[T]he knowledge we can personally acquire, the intimacy into which we
can thus enter with our species, is insufficient and unsatisfactory, because
it is restrained within the narrow circle in which we ourselves move and
observe. History alone subjects Man to our knowledge in all conditions
and circumstances. States of existence, the most widely separated in nature,
are here brought together under our inspection. Circumstances the most
dissimilar to those comprehended by our own experience are delineated . . .32
History cultivates the mind, in other words, simply by giving readers a
complete view of the human species, including especially the contrastive
touchstones of “circumstances the most dissimilar to . . . our own experience.”
The author’s confidence that direct personal experience can never provide
such a view is based on a tacit assumption that “conditions and circumstances”
transform human nature down to the core. Circumstances cannot be factored
out to reveal an underlying human essence; instead, through the mediation of
history, opposite and “widely separated” modes of life have to be compressed
into a single picture.
As this synoptic rationale for historical study became more dominant
in the s, visual metaphors for historical understanding proliferated and
72The Invention of Historical Perspective
grew more elaborate. In An Essay on the Study of Modern History (), James
Shergold Boone writes that
The philosophical observer . . . not only surveys all countries in detail, but
endeavors to comprehend them at one view: he travels with the speed of
imagination from the fields of the richest cultivation to the pathless steppe
and the barren desert. . . . He contemplates not only enlightened times, but
the ages of superstition, of ignorance, of rude and uncultivated bravery, wild
and warlike jurisprudence. . . .33
In , an anonymous essayist wrote that “chronology is to history what
perspective is to painting,” a metaphor that would be frequently repeated by
nineteenth-century writers.34 In the United States, Emma Willard took up
the analogy between chronology and perspective in a strikingly literal way.
Willard is best known for founding the Middlebury Female Seminary and
Troy Female Seminary—the first institutions of higher learning intended
specifically for women. But in addition to her institutional duties as principal
of these seminaries, Willard wrote several works on geography and history,
including A System of Universal History, In Perspective (; see Fig. 2). Like
Priestley’s historical writings, this summary of world history is accompanied
by a timeline intended to dramatize its novel plan of organization. This is,
as the title suggests, nothing less than an attempt to apply the laws of visual
perspective to historical education.
An attempt is here made to exhibit history in its proper relative proportions.
The painter allows to objects in space less and less room upon his canvass as
those objects recede into the distance. Such is equally the order of nature in
regard to objects as they exist in time. Yet, the distant mountain must have
more room in the picture than the dark valley than lies near. Thus tower
Greece and Rome, amid the dimness of antiquity, and thus sink the dark ages,
though nearer to the foreground.35
Willard’s accordingly transforms Priestley’s timeline in two ways. She makes
the timelines of various nations converge as they recede into the past, to
visually dramatize the effect of temporal distance. But she also uses “shade, as
in a picture, to represent obscurity and moral darkness, and light to represent
the reverse,” so that some temporally remote things (the Roman Empire, or
the Incarnation of Christ) seem brighter and more prominent than the recent
history of, say, China and India—which are sunk either in obscurity or in
moral darkness (the alternatives are in this picture effectively equivalent).36
The Invention of Historical Perspective
73
Twenty-first century readers are likely to be disconcerted by Willard’s
willingness to conflate the “obscurity” of a period with its “moral darkness.”
Obscurity resides entirely in the observer’s degree of information or
ignorance, whereas moral darkness is at least ostensibly an objective attribute
belonging to the period itself. Strictly speaking, there was nothing new about
this conflation. A similar conflation had always been implicit, for instance,
in references to the “Dark Ages”: the epithet implying both that we know
little about them, and that it probably wouldn’t be worth knowing more.
The conflation of subjective and objective attributes becomes newly visible
in Willard’s system, however, because she embraces it so openly. The whole
idea of presenting history “in perspective” is a candid acknowledgment that
representations of the past not only are distorted by the observer’s location,
but should be.
In the introduction to Willard’s History of the United States (), she
enlarges on this principle.
Each individual is to himself the centre of his own world; and the more
intimately he connects his knowledge with himself, the better will it be
remembered. . . . Hence, in geography, he should begin with his own town,
and pass from thence to his country, and the world at large; in history, with
the year in which he was born, and the record of the family Bible. With its
dates the mother might easily connect and teach to her child some of the
epochas of his country. Your grandfather or your father, she might say, was
born so much before or after the declaration of independence—your own
birth was during the administration of such a president.37
Since I have attended mainly to British writers up to this point, it may be
worth pausing for a moment to note how the logic of historical contrast is
both preserved and transformed as it crosses the Atlantic. Broadly, Willard
echoes the tacitly middle-class priorities of British historiography in the
early nineteenth century, presenting history not as as political education for
a ruling class, but as a mode of cultivation for private persons who would
not otherwise grasp their role in the larger system of human existence. The
strong analogy she draws between historical knowledge and personal memory
flows from this assumption, as does her willingness to embrace a degree of
perspectival ignorance about the “obscurity and moral darkness” of the past.
But Willard’s perspectival model of historical cultivation is also shaped more
specifically by her desire to assert the importance of an overlooked national
foreground. Historical education should begin with one’s own family and
Fig. 2. Emma Willard, Picture of Nations; or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire,
frontispiece from A System of Universal History, in Perspective (Hartford:
F. J. Huntington, 1835). Courtesy of the University Library of the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
76The Invention of Historical Perspective
country, not with dubious “tales of hereditary power and splendor to inflame
the imaginations of youth with desires for adventitious distinction.”38
Although Hemans and the Howitts were writing historical catalog poems
at the same time as this explicitly perspectival rhetoric flourished in historical
writing and instruction, the two discourses rarely echo each other. For one
thing, the figurative logic of the catalog poem isn’t nearly as visual as Emma
Willard’s perspectival timeline. The lyric speaker’s relation to the past is
often auditory, and when the past does rise before her as a vision, it doesn’t
do so in single-point perspective. For a direct literary analogue to Willard’s
perspectival rhetoric—and a likely influence on it—one would do better to
select the final chapter of Waverley, where Scott famously compares temporal
consciousness to the perception of depth in a landscape. “[L]ike those who
drift down a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have
made, until we fix our eye on the now distant point from which we have been
drifted.”39 But my concern in this chapter is less with particular (auditory
or visual) figures for historical consciousness than with the broader social
logic that made subjective historical consciousness seem so central to history’s
educational value. On that point, historical writing of the s and early s
does strongly parallel the romantic catalog poem. Both genres suggest that
the sublimity of historical consciousness resides, ultimately, in the way it
dramatizes culture’s power to transcend other sources of distinction.
T. B. Macaulay’s  review of William Mitford’s History of Greece is now
quoted mainly for its advocacy of social and cultural history—especially for
Macaulay’s remark that “historians . . . have confined themselves to the public
transactions of states, and have left to the negligent administration of writers
of fiction a province at least equally extensive and valuable.” But before
extracting Macaulay’s historical methodology from this review, it may be
worth recalling what he actually has to say about Mitford’s book, because the
authors’ differences of opinion about Greek history are connected in revealing
ways to Macaulay’s methodological program. According to Macaulay,
Mitford’s aristocratic political opinions produce “a marked partiality for
Lacedaemon, and a dislike of Athens.”40 Macaulay responds with an extended
defense of Athens and of popular government which is also, less overtly, a
defense of a particular model of literary and historical cultivation.
Macaulay begins with the premise that “oligarchy, wherever it has existed,
has always stunted the growth of genius.” In the history of Venice, for instance,
“we see nothing but the state; aristocracy had destroyed every seed of genius
The Invention of Historical Perspective
77
and virtue.” He sees analogous consequences in Sparta: the state swallowed
up every form of civilian excellence because Lycurgus “never considered that
governments were made for men, and not men for governments.” Macaulay
then doubles the argument back on itself by suggesting that Mitford’s
historical methodology is handicapped by the same kind of blindness.
Though it may seem a strange thing to say of a gentleman who has published
so many quartos, Mr Mitford seems to entertain a feeling, bordering on
contempt, for literary and speculative pursuits. The talents of action almost
exclusively attract his notice, and he talks with very complacent disdain of
“the idle learned.” Homer, indeed, he admires, but principally, I am afraid,
because he is convinced that Homer could neither read nor write.41
Macaulay’s contrast between different forms of history thus grows directly out
of the contrast he has developed between Sparta and Athens. Because Mitford
can see nothing but “the public transactions of states,” he is inclined to
celebrate a state like Sparta that suppressed everything else. But the greatness
of Athens can only be appreciated by a historian who appreciates culture.
Moreover, in another strange moment of self-reflexivity, it turns out that
the greatness of Athenian culture is effectively the greatness of historical
representation itself. It is, above all, a power to survey.
The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his comrades
the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket
of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the
hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no
external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual
eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all
the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet
unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man.
On a literal level this paragraph is merely about “the infinite wealth of the
mental world”—a broad abstraction that might encompass any form of
culture. But in practice it tends to envision the boundlessness of the mental
world specifically in historical terms. Culture encompasses both the “primeval
dynasties” of the past and the “yet unexplored mines” of the future. This
figural emphasis makes sense because, for Macaulay, culture’s empire lies in
its power to transcend time and space. “All the triumphs of truth and genius
over prejudice and power, in every country and every age, have been the
triumphs of Athens.”42
78The Invention of Historical Perspective
Macaulay hints that this portable triumph may have set up residence in
England at the moment, but he ends the review with a famous peroration
intended to drive home the point that the empire of culture finally transcends
nationality.
When those who have rivaled her [Athens’] greatness shall have shared her
fate; when civilisation and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant
continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when,
perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall in vain labour to decipher on
some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage
hymns chaunted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest
temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of
the ten thousand masts;—her influence and her glory will still survive,—
immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin,
and over which they exercise their control.43
“Her influence and her glory will still survive” at the end of this sentence refers
back to Athens, but a reader might easily attach the pronoun to England, and
the slipperiness of reference is no accident. A panorama of ruined London
has oddly been inserted in the middle of this sentence about Athens, in
order to remind readers that British greatness rests on the same foundation
as Athens’—not political or military, but cultural. This is a geopolitical
claim, but it also carries—in the context of this review—pointed domestic
implications. The social distinctions sought by aristocrats and political
leaders (“the name of our proudest chief”) are reduced to illegible characters
“on some mouldering pedestal,” while the reader is invited to identify instead
with the perspective of nameless travelers who survey these ruins from the
imperishable vantage point of “civilisation and knowledge.” Civilization and
knowledge are imperishable, in this essay, because they are never actually
incarnated in a particular nation or historical moment; they are represented
instead as a perspective that has the power to survey and assimilate “the
infinite wealth of the mental world”—from the “primeval dynasties” of the
past to the unexplored ruins of a future London.
Macaulay is inviting readers to identify with a perspective that strongly
resembles the perspective sketched out in historical catalog poems. As in
catalog poems, the allure of this perspective has everything to do with the
way it revalues different forms of distinction. Like Macaulay’s travelers, the
speakers of catalog poems are located at a distance that makes names and
events illegible, revealing the hollowness not just of fame but of all the forms
The Invention of Historical Perspective
79
of social consequence specific to a particular place and time. At this distance,
the only distinction that matters is the mental cultivation that allows an
observer to rise above his or her own location and survey the diversity of
human history. In Macaulay’s essays for the Edinburgh Review, this model
of historical cultivation as perspective, originally championed by Joseph
Priestley, distinctly displaces the older model that had relied on the instructive
force of biographical example.
Priestley and Macaulay are both better known for their optimism about
progress than for the slightly apocalyptic perspective on the past I’ve been
sketching in this chapter. But there is less conflict between the two attitudes
than one might suppose. For Macaulay, at any rate, the infinite diversity of
human society—which elevated “literary and speculative pursuits” over other
forms of distinction—also guaranteed progress, as he explains in this passage
from an  essay on history, describing Europe in the early modern era.
[T]he second civilization of mankind commenced, under circumstances
which afforded a strong security that it would never retrograde and never
pause. Europe was now a great federal community. Her numerous states
were united by the easy ties of international law and a common religion.
Their institutions, their languages, their manners, their tastes in literature,
their modes of education, were widely different. Their connection was close
enough to allow of mutual observation and improvement, yet not so close
as to destroy the idioms of national opinion and feeling. . . . The civilized
world has thus been preserved from an uniformity of character fatal to all
improvement. Every part of it has been illuminated with light reflected from
every other. Competition has produced activity where monopoly would have
produced sluggishness. The number of experiments in moral science which
the speculator has an opportunity of witnessing has been increased beyond all
calculation. Society and human nature, instead of being seen in a single point
of view, are presented to him under ten thousand different aspects.44
Disunity ensures progress here in the same way that cultural achievement
ensures immortality: it creates an infinitely complex perspective that
transcends any individual form of life, because it views society “under
ten thousand different aspects.” This cultural argument is admittedly
complemented by an economic analogy: “competition has produced activity
where monopoly would have produced sluggishness.” But this only serves as a
reminder that in the s, the advocates of historical and literary cultivation
were still to a great extent the same people as the advocates of political
80The Invention of Historical Perspective
economy. These two branches of middle-class polemic had not yet diverged
widely enough to declare unremitting war on each other.45
The panorama of ruined London at the end of Macaulay’s review of
Mitford is better known in a later incarnation. Macaulay revisited the image
in his  review of Ranke’s History of the Popes, transforming the “travelers
from distant regions” into a traveler specifically “from New Zealand [who]
shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of
London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” Anthony Trollope considered
titling an unpublished work of social observation “The New Zealander,” and
this tourist of the future was invoked so often by other authors that in 
Punch was forced to include him in a list of “used up, exhausted, threadbare,
stale, and hackneyed” literary devices. “The retirement of this veteran is
indispensable. He can no longer be suffered to impede the traffic over London
Bridge. Much wanted at the present time in his own country. May return
when London is in ruins.” 46 Used as a comic tag, the New Zealander tended to
shrink into a generic figure for the future; at least on the surface, there is little
in this figure of speech to recall the apotheosis of historical culture at the end
of Macaulay’s  review. As a cultural observer in a much-changed valley of
the Thames, H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller is connected in a more substantive
way to Macaulay’s themes, but the connection perhaps only underlines how
questionable Macaulay’s assumptions had become by , since history is
altogether forgotten among the Eloi and Morlocks, and culture (in the form of
the Palace of Green Porcelain) is a dusty ruin to be looted for useful matches.
But of course, by Wells’s time, the model of historical cultivation celebrated
in essays and poems of the s had found a more secure home than literary
speculation: it had been institutionalized as the organizing framework of
historical and literary education.
3
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
L
who don’t specialize in the nineteenth century may not realize that “English language and literature” became
a subject of university instruction in London in . Even scholars who do
specialize in the nineteenth century often have the impression that nothing of much significance happened in the discipline before Matthew Arnold.
Thirty years ago one might have blamed this blind spot on the shadow cast
by Oxbridge: formal English study didn’t begin at Oxford and Cambridge
until the end of the nineteenth century, and historians were slow to recognize the institutions where it had flourished earlier in the century (serving
a more provincial, colonial, or middle-class audience) as sites of intellectual
leadership. Today, however, it is difficult to blame elitism or ignorance for
our indifference to the early history of English studies. Over the last thirty
years, scholars have richly documented the development of vernacular literary study in India, America, and Scotland, and several books have described
the creation of “English language and literature” at London colleges in the
s and s.1 And yet, these accounts haven’t changed English professors’
mental model of their discipline as much as one might expect. The discipline
of English still largely understands itself as springing from an Arnoldian concept of culture, or—in Gerald Graff’s still-influential account—from a late
nineteenth-century struggle between general culture and a professionalized
research-centered university imported from Germany.2
If the teaching of English before  has attracted less attention than
i t er a r y s c h o l a r s
81
82The Invention of the Period Survey Course
one might expect, one reason may be that its story has generally been told
as a struggle between several familiar and well-formed disciplinary projects.
“Rhetoric,” “philology,” “moral instruction,” and “belles lettres” enter the
arena, but it is difficult to work up much suspense, because we all know in
advance that “belles lettres” will leave victorious, marry nationalism, and give
birth to the prose works of Matthew Arnold. When the disciplinary projects
of the s fail to fit any of these templates, researchers commonly solve the
problem by explaining that professors were confused, or torn between the
competing claims of several familiar projects.
Franklin Court’s Institutionalizing English Literature ()—perhaps the
best existing account of early-nineteenth-century literary study—makes a
good example. Court focuses on two London colleges, founded in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century. The University of London—which I’ll call
here by its modern name, University College—began instruction in  to
serve an urban, largely middle-class audience. Neither students nor faculty
were required to profess a religion, and no denomination was excluded.
King’s College began instruction shortly thereafter (), as an avowedly
Anglican alternative in London. (Both colleges were later absorbed by the
omnibus institution that now bears the name “University of London.”)
From their foundation, University College and King’s College both offered
instruction in “English language and literature”—a discipline that departed
from the older rubric of “rhetoric and belles lettres,” I’ll suggest, above all by
adopting an explicitly historical approach to language and literature. Where
the institutional history of this transition is concerned, Court’s account is
detailed and reliable. But he consistently interprets the intellectual projects
of the discipline’s first professors as signs of confusion. Henry Rogers, for
instance, who taught English at University College from  to , is
introduced as someone who “seems not to have known what he wanted to do
with the English chair.” According to Court, Rogers was torn between moral
instruction and philology, “caught between the inclination to use literature
. . . as a vehicle for promoting Christian morality . . . and his conviction
that really the only sensible way to deal with language in the classroom was
to analyze and parse it.” Rogers’s confusion is mirrored by confusion in a
faculty senate torn between “rhetoric” and “philology.” “The senate, like
Rogers, was unclear about what an English professor should do.” In fact,
it’s not too sweeping a generalization to say that in Court’s narrative, the
s are one long muddle, resolved only at the beginning of the s when
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
83
professors finally make “the discovery, remarkable for the time, that the
successful institutionalization of formal literary study depended to a great
extent on literary criticism.”3
If this were in fact the trajectory of English instruction in the early
nineteenth century, it would point to the unsurprising conclusion that
English studies was from the beginning destined to become what it now is.
But the real story is more surprising, because the things that seem peculiar
to us about English in the s were not actually consequences of confusion.
Henry Rogers thought he knew quite well what an English professor should
do. As I’ll show later in this chapter, he articulated a clear rationale for
the study of English language and literature, publishing parts of it in the
Edinburgh Review, and parts of it in his General Introduction to a Course of
Lectures on English Grammar and Composition (). Moreover, Rogers’s
project was largely consistent with the rationale that had originally convinced
the founders of University College to hire professors in “English Language
and Literature,” and consistent with the goals of most other professors who
taught at University College and King’s College in the s. Rogers seems
confused only because his project—combining elements of what we call
“rhetoric,” what we call “philology,” and what we call “literary history”—is so
alien to us that its coherence is difficult to recognize.
The problem is not that this project lacked a purpose. Rhetorical practice,
language study, and literary history were in fact firmly organized around the
central premise that students needed to understand the history of English
literature, from its origin to the present, in order to write well. It was a
coherent educational project, with a practical aim borrowed from rhetoric,
although its attempt to produce rhetorical mastery through historical study
may now seem implausible to us. The goal seems implausible, I will argue,
partly because it organizes the discipline according to a different historical
logic than the one we’re familiar with. English professors still trust—or, at
any rate, hope—that studying literary history will enrich students’ mastery
of the language. But instead of cultivating that mastery simply by exposing
students to a broad range of good models, the syllabi of the s asked them
specifically to explain the transitions that linked each stage of linguistic
development to the next. What strains our credulity, I think, is the notion
that students need a complete, continuous explanation of long-term historical
change in order to write well. We tend to balk, in other words, at what appears
to us an overvaluation of historical continuity.
84The Invention of the Period Survey Course
As previous chapters of this book have attempted to show, a very different
model of education was already circulating in novels and poems, which
celebrated historical cultivation by dramatizing the dizzying gulfs of change
or oblivion a cultivated mind had to internalize. By the early nineteenth
century, this model of cultivation was even beginning to affect historical
handbooks and timelines, which sometimes conveyed historical perspective,
paradoxically, by highlighting the necessary ignorance it entailed. But
dramatizing paradox in a timeline, or a poem, is one thing; explicitly founding
a new discipline on paradox is a riskier enterprise. For that reason, I would
suggest, the professors who taught English literary history in the s at first
clung to an older and more rationalistic model of historical cultivation—one
that insisted on the useful continuity of past and present. Only in the s
did this developmental rationale for English studies give way to one founded
on the paradox (which we no longer find paradoxical) that students could best
grasp the unity of English literature by studying a succession of distinct and
incommensurable “period styles.” This shift required professors to develop a
new kind of course: a course that spent an entire term unfolding the character
of a single literary period.
Period survey courses became the mainstay of undergraduate coursework
in English in the second half of the nineteenth century, and they retain that
role today. Their centrality in the undergraduate curriculum is linked to a set
of customs that tend to organize the whole profession of literary study around
periodization: new professors are often hired to cover a particular period, for
which reason graduate students are usually encouraged to shape their research
around a period rubric. Broader patterns of disciplinary communication (in
conferences, journals, and so on) are in turn strongly shaped by the central
role of periodization in hiring and professional development. At present,
these different aspects of periodization interlock and reinforce each other in
a circular way: it would be difficult to say whether periodization is sustained
most importantly by its role in the undergraduate curriculum, in graduate
specialization, or in organizing research. But historically, it is easy to see
that the curriculum came first: period surveys reshaped the undergraduate
curriculum long before any English professor had the luxury of specializing
in a period.
Period surveys were not offered by English departments until the s.
The courses offered in the s had always endeavored to cover the full sweep
of English literary history in a single term. Moreover, these courses stressed
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
85
the causal connections between broad stages of development rather than the
distinct character of narrowly defined periods. Frederick Denison Maurice
seems to have been the first professor to design courses that isolated single
periods of literary history for sustained exploration; in the early s, this
became the dominant mode of literary instruction at King’s College, where he
taught. Over the course of the next two decades the period-survey course was
adopted by professors of English at University College, and as other institutions
created departments of English later in the century, they too adopted a
period-centered curriculum. Because the choice to emphasize periodization
was made so early in the history of the discipline, subsequent generations of
literary scholars have rarely seen it as a choice at all, and a period-centered
curriculum may now seem an inevitable logistical convenience. But the
structure of literary education in the s was equally well suited to the kind
of knowledge the discipline was then seeking to produce, which focused
on genetic connections rather than contrasts. Moreover, the shift from
developmentally-organized courses to period surveys was motivated, not by
staffing problems or logistical convenience, but by an explicitly-articulated
belief that middle-class students needed a kind of perspective that only
historical contrast could provide. Maurice expounded this opinion at length
in his published writings, and its effect on his courses can be reconstructed
from examinations and letters in the unpublished archives of King’s College.
The emergence of the first period surveys thus casts light, not just on the
structure of the curriculum, but on the transformation of basic assumptions
about the cultural purpose of literary education.
Better Writing Through Etymology
In the late eighteenth century, literary texts were taught primarily as
rhetorical models. In keeping with that purpose, they were commonly
organized by genre or audience. Hugh Blair’s lectures on rhetoric and belles
lettres, first published in , are typical. If a student needs to know how
to speak at the bar, Blair invites him to read Cicero. If the student needs
epistolary grace, he is urged to consult the letters of “Mr. Pope, Dean Swift,
and their friends.” Anthologies of vernacular literature that anticipated
schoolroom use, like Elegant Extracts, followed a similar plan of organization,
emphasizing genre, audience, and theme.4 In these anthologies and textbooks,
chronology is largely ignored; there was, after all, no obvious reason why
86The Invention of the Period Survey Course
chronology should matter for students who were reading in order to become
better speakers and writers.
In the late s, when colleges began to hire the first professors of English
Language and Literature, the rationale for studying literature was still primarily
that it made students better writers. But the new courses were organized
historically, rather than by genre—a decision with fateful consequences for
the discipline. The rationale for chronological organization was drawn, not
from literary history, but from a historical transformation of rhetoric itself. In
the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the notion had taken root that
students needed to understand the progressive development of language and
literature in order to write well. More specifically, effective writing depended
on understanding the origins and history of individual words. When the
historical study of literature was institutionalized in the s, it was justified
largely as an extension of this existing rhetorical project.
These stages in the historical transformation of vernacular literary study
have not been widely understood, because historians of the discipline tend
to describe all historical approaches to language as forms of “philology,”
and then assume that “philology” must have appealed to contemporaries
by promising inductive, scientistic rigor. This makes it hard to discern the
motivations that actually governed instruction. The term “philology” becomes
appropriate by the s, but it can be a misleading rubric for English studies
in the earlier part of the century, since it tends to evoke a kind of inductive
research that was not yet common in England. While scholars like Rasmus
Rask and Jacob Grimm were laying the foundations of comparative philology
on the European continent, English language study remained dominated by
John Horne Tooke.5 Tooke’s approach to language was radically historical:
indeed, he argued that it was crucial to understand the history of language
in order to speak and reason clearly. But he did not adopt the inductive
approach we associate with modern philology, comparing languages in order
to deduce patterns of phonetic change. In Tooke’s hands, language history
was a prescriptive science of the mind, linked more closely to John Locke and
Etienne de Condillac than to a figure like Grimm.
Tooke’s reputation rests on ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΑ, or the Diversions of Purley
(, ), a two-volume treatise on language thinly disguised as a dialogue
between Tooke and several friends. The dialogue begins with a discussion of
grammar, a subject Tooke recommends as “absolutely necessary in the search
after philosophical truth.” But Tooke also insists that knowledge of grammar
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
87
can be obtained “by a plain man of sense without what is commonly called
Learning.” Instead of exhaustively classifying parts of speech, the plain man
of sense merely needs to understand the fundamental relationship between
words and ideas. Most grammarians go wrong by assuming that every word
stands for exactly one corresponding idea. But in fact, Tooke argues, many
classes of words are merely “abbreviations employed for despatch,” as “the
signs of other words.”6 These abbreviations are the “wings of thought”—the
“winged words” alluded to in Tooke’s Greek title. In the rest of his treatise,
Tooke proceeds to argue that nouns and verbs alone are the original parts
of speech; all the other parts of speech can be understood as abbreviated
combinations of nouns and verbs.
Tooke’s treatise reshaped the study of language in Great Britain for a
generation. As Hans Aarslef puts it,
The reputation of Tooke’s Diversions is one of the most remarkable phenomena
in the intellectual and scholarly life of England during the first third of the
nineteenth century. For thirty years it kept England immune to the new
philology until the results and methods finally had to be imported from the
Continent in the s, and even then they met strong opposition.7
The power of Tooke’s example depended, not on the strength of his etymological
evidence, but on the prescriptive rhetorical conclusions his theory seemed to
license. To analyze inflections and parts of speech into their component ideas,
Tooke suggests, is to strike a blow against empty abstractions, and to reveal a
more intelligible language of “separate and distinct ideas” that is still present
although hidden within our own “corrupted” language.8
In the context of the s, this theory had clear radical associations.
Tooke was active in reformist politics—he was, among other things, one of
the defendants tried for treason in —and he was not at all reticent about
his political commitments in The Diversions of Purley. Tooke’s etymologies
of “right” and “law,” for instance, trace the words back to the root idea of
“command,” while taking care to distinguish what is commanded “by princes
or ministers or the corrupted sham representatives of a people” from “that
which is ordered, commanded, or laid down by God, human nature, or the
constitution of this government.”9 Here the concept of “law” is made concrete
in order to reveal how reverence for a word can betray the reality it is meant
to represent. Tooke’s attacks on “a metaphysical jargon and a false morality,
which can only be dissipated by etymology” have something in common (as
88The Invention of the Period Survey Course
Olivia Smith has argued) with Thomas Paine’s refusal to let thought remain
“immured in the Bastille of a word.”10
But the radical implications of Tooke’s argument do not seem to have
limited his influence in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Tooke’s
attempt to correct language by restoring it to its substantive foundations was,
after all, a continuation of a project with a long history in Britain—extending
from Francis Bacon through John Locke to much eighteenth-century natural
philosophy. It may be true that this empirical project often entailed a tacit
skepticism about the claims of established authority. But if so, it was by the
s a skepticism too deeply ingrained in British intellectual tradition to be
uprooted by a decade or two of reaction. In any case, the innovation that Tooke
himself deserves most credit for—the notion that the substantive foundations
of language could be recovered historically, through etymology—was not
perceived as inherently radical. Early-nineteenth-century philosophers of
language, like Walter Whiter, did not feel that they had to adopt Tooke’s
politics in order to adopt his emphasis on etymology.11
But although early-nineteenth-century language study was not organized
around a consistent set of political principles, it was still at bottom a
prescriptive science, which aimed to improve rhetorical practice by uncovering
the substantive foundations of language. The best way to trace this is to focus
on the pedagogically influential but now almost ignored genre of “books of
synonymy.” Romanticists are familiar with S. T. Coleridge’s penchant for
“desynonymization”—his habit of doing intellectual work by establishing
a distinction between terms commonly used as synonyms. “Fancy” and
“imagination” are the best-known examples, but James McKusick has pointed
out that the gesture was already second nature for Coleridge in .12 In fact,
Coleridge was only a particularly creative and self-conscious practitioner of a
technique that had been promoted as an element of cultivated style ever since
“books of synonymy” began to appear in the middle of the eighteenth century.
The first English one appears to be The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed
Synonymous, in the English Language () by John Trusler, a prolific abridger
and writer of self-improvement books. Trusler borrowed the basic idea of the
genre, and a certain amount of content as well, from Synonymes François ()
by the abbé Gabriel Girard. The modern equivalent of this work would be
a thesaurus, but books of synonymy weren’t designed to be used as college
freshmen use thesauri—to permit elegant variation. They weren’t arranged
alphabetically, for one thing: you had to read them through. Moreover, notice
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
89
that Trusler didn’t advertise his book as a guide to synonyms but to words
esteemed synonymous: books of synonymy underlined distinctions, in order
to save you from the gaffe of offering someone counsel when you were really
offering advice or admonishment.
The end of admonition, is gentle reproof. Advice and counsel, are to convey
instruction; but with this difference, that advice, implies no superiority with
respect either to rank or parts, in the person who gives it; whereas, counsel,
generally, carries with it one, if not both.13
Trusler’s book went through at least five editions between the s and
the s. Interestingly, in  the title changed. Instead of The Difference,
Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous it becomes The Distinction Between
Words Esteemed Synonymous. Some might call this a distinction without a
difference, but perhaps Trusler had succeeded in raising (his own) standards
of precise diction. Hester Piozzi came out with a similar but livelier guide in
the s, and several others came out in the early nineteenth century. Books
of synonymy were seen as a significant part of literary culture; they were
reviewed in venues like the Quarterly Review.14
Etymology had no place in the eighteenth century books of synonymy by
Girard, Trusler, and Piozzi. But it became central to early nineteenth-century
examples of the genre. Here are a few typical entries in English Synonyms
Discriminated (), by William Taylor, an influential book that was still
being reprinted as late as .
Keen (german kühn) is etymologically connected with the icelandish kinn, the
jaw, the grinders . . . it originally signifies strong of jaw, able to bite, hungry,
voracious. . . . Metaphorically it is applied to those who know how to get their
bread in the world; who possess a somewhat eager appetite for the means of
maintenance. . . . Sharp is etymologically connected with share, the cutter of
a plough, and shears . . .
He is sharp who is cutting, he is acute who is piercing, in his observations;
he is keen, who has an interested purpose in making them. Acuteness
announces penetration, sharpness an ungentle temper; and keenness a selfish
rapacity.15
Taylor is working on the Tookean premise that “every word . . . must at first
have represented a sensible idea.”16 So keen, for instance, is fundamentally
about jaws, whereas sharp is about a cutting edge—and, Taylor seems to
imply, these words should still be used with an awareness of the underlying
90The Invention of the Period Survey Course
metaphor. Little survives here of Tooke’s political project. What does survive is
a vivid sense of the historical distance separating the literal and metaphorical
senses of words. Taylor suggests that writers need to be aware of that distance
in order to write effective, idiomatic prose.
Ripeness. Maturity.
Ripeness is saxon and maturity is latin for the same idea; both describe
fullness of growth in fruit. But, with the usual fortune of such duplicates
in our language, the native word is commonly applied in the proper, and
the foreign word in the metaphoric sense. The ripeness of an orange. The
maturity of a project. . . . These applications could change places; but there
would be something of pedantry in saying ‘a mature apricot,’ the derivation
would be to recollect: and there would be something of eloquence in saying ‘a
ripe judgment,’ the metaphor would be thrust into observation.17
Taylor is not confining usage here, but trying to give writers meaningful
choices. The idea is that by paying attention to etymology, a writer can make
the figurative dimension of his language more or less salient, and tailor it
to scholarly or oratorical purposes as needed. Passages like this, which are
frequent in English Synonyms Discriminated, helped initiate an educational
project that flourished all the way through the twentieth century, remaining
salient in Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and George Orwell’s “Politics
and the English Language”—the project of encouraging writers to be
constantly aware of the Latinate or Germanic coloring of their diction. In the
twenty-first century, this etymological project has dwindled into a relatively
minor feature of English instruction, but in the early nineteenth century it
provided a central motive for reorganizing the study of vernacular language
and literature as a historical discipline.
When English Language and Literature was introduced as a university
subject in the s, the chief rationale for approaching the subject historically
was that writers needed to understand the history of their language in order
to use its rhetorical resources. For instance, the Council of the University
of London issued a statement in  explaining the aims of the fledgling
institution, and the major divisions of its proposed course of study. This was
probably the first institutional document to name “English Language and
Literature” as one of “those subjects which constitute the essential parts of
a liberal education.” Not surprisingly, the Council’s justification for the new
subject was closely modeled on existing justifications for rhetorical study:
their primary aim was to make students better writers. The same practical
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
91
goal justified a comparative and historical approach to language, but it did
so through an odd parenthesis: “the comparison of various languages, makes
each of them better understood, and illustrates the affinity of nations, while
it enlarges and strengthens the understanding.”18 It is easy to see how making
language “better understood” could strengthen rhetorical skills. But how
does the study of language “illustrate the affinity of nations,” and why should
those “affinities” matter, practically, to a writer?
The short answer to that question is “etymology.” To understand how
etymology was in practice supposed to improve writing, we need to ask how
English language and literature was actually taught at the London colleges
in the first few years of their existence. Fortunately, these institutions have
preserved a rich trove of documentation in their college “calendars” or catalogs,
especially course descriptions and exams. In characterizing these documents,
I’ll often refer to “the London colleges” collectively—although King’s College
was founded in explicit (Anglican) opposition to the nondenominational
University College. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the discipline of
English studies was so young, and departments were so small, that curricula
were defined less by institutional tradition than by individual hiring decisions,
and faculty sometimes moved from one institution to another. For instance,
the first professor of English at University College, Thomas Dale, was hired in
 only to resign in  and accept an appointment as the first professor of
English at King’s College. So in the s, it often makes sense to refer to both
institutions collectively.
A few descriptions survive of Dale’s course at University College, but a
set of prize examinations from  preserved at King’s College give more
detailed evidence about his pedagogical practice, and thus probably indicate
how English was taught in the early years of both institutions. In the academic
year –, Dale seems to have taught junior-level courses on “English
Language” and “The Principles and Practice of English Composition,”
as well as a senior-level course on “English Philology and Rhetoric” and a
course on “English Literature” open to juniors and seniors alike. The prize
examinations for all four of these courses suggest an emphasis on the genesis
of the English language, and especially on its relationship to ancestral
sources. The senior exam on “philology and rhetoric” asks students to
distinguish classes of English nouns derived from Saxon, French, Greek,
and Latin.19 The junior exam on language asks students to “give examples
of English verbs derived . from the Saxon, . from the Latin, . from the
92The Invention of the Period Survey Course
Greek.”20 Even the exam on Literature asks students to divide literary history
into periods that emphasize the genesis of English from a fusion of Saxon
and Norman French: “Pure Saxon,” “Norman-Saxon,” “Incipient English,”
and “Progressive English.”21
Dale’s exam on “Principles and Practice of English Composition” might
at first seem free of this obsession with linguistic genesis. But in reading the
exam, one also needs to read between the lines for the intended answers.
Consider, for instance, question number five: “Distinguish accurately between
the apparent synonyms, affront, insult; uncover, discover, detect; attraction,
allurement; effective, efficient, efficacious, effectual; recall, repeal, revoke, call
back.”22 This question isn’t overtly etymological. But I have been able to trace
each of these sets of words to a separate article in William Taylor’s English
Synonyms Discriminated, which must have been used as a textbook in Dale’s
composition course. Moreover, Dale seems to have chosen several articles that
specifically illustrate the etymological thesis we’ve already seen dramatized
in Taylor’s distinction between “ripeness” and “maturity”—that is, Taylor’s
belief that words from different ancestral sources need to be used with a tacit
consciousness of their national origin. Here, for instance, is Taylor on “recall,
repeal, revoke, call back”:
To recall is english, to repeal is french (rapeller) and to revoke is latin
(revocare) for the same idea to call back. Our conversation is english: we
recall our directions to servants, and other family arrangements. Our laws
are french: we repeal acts of parliament, and exiles of the state. Our oratory is
latin: we revoke a panegyric, a denunciation, a promise, or a threat.23
In short, the study of English was felt to illustrate “the affinity of nations”
because etymology was taught, not merely as evidence about the past, but
as a sign of the living and persistent presence of other national traditions
(including the long-vanished rulers of Normandy and Rome) inside English
language and society. We “repeal” laws because “our laws are french.” By
uncovering those international connections, the etymologist could restore a
vivid and concrete meaning obscured by time. This rhetorical application of
etymology played a pivotal role in the English curriculum throughout the
s. The notion that students needed to understand the origins of words in
order to use them effectively justified the relatively new fields of literary and
linguistic history by connecting them to the practical and time-honored aims
of rhetoric. What otherwise would students gain from reading Caedmon? The
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
93
premise that etymology had rhetorical force not only bound Thomas Dale’s
courses on language, literature, and composition to each other, but permitted
their goals to fuse in a capstone senior course on “English Philology and
Rhetoric”—treated as reciprocal aspects of a single subject.
Toward the beginning of the decade (for instance in the courses of Thomas
Dale), the rhetorical value ascribed to etymology was still modeled on the
theories of Horne Tooke. Since all words were originally concrete ideas, tracing
them back to their origin was simply a way of clarifying their true, substantial
meaning. But as this pedagogical project matured, professors increasingly
sought to clarify its practical application by producing a set of easily-taught
general rules about the relative advantages of Saxon and Latin words. Henry
Rogers, for instance, who taught English language and literature at University
College from  to , argued in the Edinburgh Review that the secret of a
cultivated style lay in judicious diction, because
To know how to employ, in the due degree and on the proper occasions, either
the Saxon or the classical elements of our language; when to aim at strength
and when at refinement of expression—to be energetic without coarseness
and polished without affectation—is the most conclusive proof of a highly
cultivated taste.24
Rogers recommended Saxon words especially to “the orator and the poet,”
and Latin to writers who sought refinement, politeness, or philosophic
abstraction. 25 His published lectures stress the importance of audience:
“the staple of all discourses intended for the people should be words derived
from the Saxon.”26 Rogers’s successor at University College, R. G. Latham,
also stressed that writers needed to understand the “derivation” of words in
order to use them correctly.27 But in the s, belief in the rhetorical value
of etymology was not by any means restricted to professors. S. T. Coleridge
suggested in  that “a composite language like the English” might be “a
happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German,”
because the profusion of “Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes” permits “a
wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings.”28 Thomas DeQuincey
eventually expanded this insight into a set of rhetorical rules. “Simple
narration, and a pathos resting upon artless circumstances,—elementary
feelings,—homely and household affections,—these are most suitably
managed by the old indigenous Saxon vocabulary. But a passion which
rises into grandeur, which is complex, elaborate, and interveined with high
94The Invention of the Period Survey Course
meditative feelings, would languish or absolutely halt, without aid from the
Latin moiety of our language.”29
When contemporary historians of English studies describe nineteenthcentury preoccupation with linguistic origins, they often sum the
phenomenon up as “racial” or “nationalistic” in a way that blurs distinctions
between significantly different projects. This is partly true, for instance, even
in Franklin Court’s work on the topic. Court treats R. G. Latham (hired at
University College in ) as a figure who introduced a fateful preoccupation
with “cultural origins” to a philological curriculum that had previously
been blandly factual, thereby producing a “critical discourse that centered
on concepts of ‘nationality.’”30 Court is absolutely right to draw attention to
Latham’s work in comparative ethnology. But it isn’t the case that Latham was
the first English professor to emphasize nationality and cultural origins. As we
have seen, those themes were central from the moment the first professor of
English was hired at University College. It would be better to say that Latham
represents the leading edge of an ethnic, and often racial, interpretation
of nationality—an interpretation that would later give rise to remarks like
Matthew Arnold’s famous generalizations about the competing “Celtic” and
“Teutonic” elements of English character.
In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, language study was
profoundly concerned with tracing national genealogy. But it rarely made
much effort to found its account of linguistic history on durable ethnic or
racial essences. William Taylor, for instance, doesn’t suggest that the Romans
were an inherently abstract and the Saxons an inherently earthy people; rather,
he says that this is how their words have been used in English—according
to “the usual fortune of such duplicates in our language, the native word is
commonly applied in the proper, and the foreign word in the metaphoric
sense.”31 For that matter, the prominence of nationality in this discourse tells
us less than we might assume about its motivations. The rhetorical uses of
etymology didn’t—in the first half of the nineteenth century—usually entail
a simple preference for “native” over “foreign” vocabulary, such as we see, for
instance, in E. B. White’s advice: “Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin,
so use Anglo-Saxon words.” This advice—added to The Elements of Style by
White in —is not only more essentialist than the advice professors were
giving in the s (inasmuch as it attributes liveliness to the Anglo-Saxon
language itself), but less useful, inasmuch as it urges the student to avoid a
huge swath of the dictionary. The view that prevailed in the s was subtler:
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
95
students should use Saxon and Latin words freely, but use them on different
occasions and for different purposes. The richness of the “composite”
English language was often praised, and the point of tracing English words
to different sources was not to extol a single, enduring spirit of “Englishness.”
The implicit lesson was, on the contrary, that a cultivated writer needed to be
familiar with many vanished nations (Saxons, Romans, Normans, Greeks)
and to understand the roles they had respectively played in the formation of
British customs, laws, and learned discourse.
In short, the emerging discipline of English studies was organized
around assumptions that were at the same time nationalist and historicist.
The English curriculum was explicitly designed to foster national selfconsciousness (expressed practically, as mastery of English style). But it
also emphasized that national character was a mutable and composite
thing, formed over time by contributions from several different nations—a
premise that incidentally allowed English professors to borrow the prestige
of classical scholarship, and to approach Anglo-Saxon with similar scholarly
ambitions. The tension between nationalistic and antiquarian dimensions of
this curriculum made the notion of developmental unity absolutely central.
Questions about the comparative structure of Saxon and Latin verbs could be
justified as contributing to the student’s mastery of modern English only if
all past phases of linguistic development were understood to leave permanent
traces in the present. Not surprisingly, summaries of English courses from the
s tend to underline developmental continuity; Thomas Dale, for instance,
divided his course on English literature into periods, but gave the periods
names—“Norman-Saxon,” “Incipient English,” “Progressive English”—that
define a straightforward through-line from the gradual dissolution of old
languages to the gradual emergence of a new one.
The First Period Survey Courses
When English literature was taught at universities in the s and s,
the whole panorama of English literary history was always covered in a single
term. Outside of the academy, there were certainly precedents for a slower and
more period-centered approach to literature: William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the
Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (), for instance, approximate the
pace and scope of a modern “period survey” course, which spends a whole
semester exploring a single period of literary history. But I can find no record
96The Invention of the Period Survey Course
of similar experiments at universities until the s. At first glance, this might
plausibly be explained as a consequence of limited staffing: at both King’s
College and University College, the department of English consisted of a
single professor, who had to teach courses on language and rhetoric as well as
literature. But invoking department size as an explanation would make it very
hard to understand how period surveys were introduced in the s, because
the size of English departments did not increase. F. D. Maurice introduced
a periodized curriculum at King’s College without hiring additional staff,
as I’ll shortly explain, simply by admitting that he wouldn’t be able to
cover all of English literary history. It appears that professors compressed
English literature into a single term in the s because they were genuinely
committed to covering it all sequentially: the educational rationale of the
discipline demanded that national history be transmitted as a unified whole.
Details about “Norman-Saxon” language and literature had practical utility
only insofar as they could be connected to a developmental narrative that (at
least ostensibly) fostered a mastery of present-day English style. Disjointed
pieces of the story would have nothing but an antiquarian interest.
Why didn’t English professors immediately grasp that conveying period
character could be, in itself, a worthy educational project? It’s not as though
early-nineteenth-century writers lacked interest in periodization, or in
the concept of period style. On the contrary, the notion that each period is
animated by a distinct “spirit of the age” was notoriously central to earlynineteenth-century criticism from William Hazlitt to P. B. Shelley to J. S.
Mill. What professors lacked in the s was a model of personal cultivation
organized around this concept: to put it bluntly, no one had yet advanced a
theory of education that explained why periodization was good for you. So
there was no reason to organize a curriculum around it.
F. D. Maurice played a pivotal role, both in articulating such a theory,
and in creating the first period survey courses. In other words, he helped
fundamentally reshape the theory of historical cultivation that underpinned
the discipline of English studies, and invented a structure that the curriculum
retains to this day. For all of these reasons, I think Maurice deserves a much
larger role in the history of the discipline than he has yet received. In the
context of nineteenth-century Anglican theology, of course, Maurice is far
from obscure. He has a central place in the history of Christian socialism and
of the Broad Church movement; his dismissal from King’s College in , for
theological heterodoxy, made him a cause célèbre among liberal Victorians.
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
97
He is also well known as a founder of colleges for working men and women
(including The Working Men’s College, and Queen’s College for the education
of governesses). Nor have his years teaching English at King’s College (from
 to ) been entirely ignored. In his study of English at the London
colleges, Franklin Court recognizes Maurice’s commitment to literary history
as a mode of spiritual development.
Court also rightly senses that Maurice put a new kind of emphasis on the
historical dimension of literature. But the nature of this innovation has been
misunderstood ever since Alan Bacon contrasted Maurice (who was hired to
teach both English and Modern History) to Thomas Dale, who supposedly
“seems to have gone out of his way to keep literature and history as separate as
possible.”32 Court echoes Bacon’s judgment on this point: “Dale had separated
literature and history; Maurice combined them.”33 In fact, Thomas Dale had
always taught English literature historically: he organized it chronologically,
divided it into periods, and insisted on the connection between literary
works and great national events. Moreover, Maurice proposed to connect
literature and history through the same medium Dale had used: the history of
language. In his inaugural lecture, Maurice announces that “we shall find [in]
the study of words and constructions, the very link between literature and
history, between the particular book we are reading and the age in which that
book was written.”34 This remark is distinguished from Dale’s approach only
in what it leaves out: Maurice makes no reference to a larger developmental
narrative, but seems to assume that the historian’s task is complete as soon as
he has linked the language of a particular text to the spirit of its age.
The hint provided by this negative evidence is borne out by the record of
Maurice’s teaching. Maurice never attempted to survey English literature in a
single term. He began, in fact, by teaching a course solely on the “Prologue”
to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In subsequent years he settled into a rhythm
that more closely approximated the modern “period survey,” teaching courses
on, for instance, the Elizabethan period, Jacobean literature, and the reign
of George III. This contraction of the syllabus was accompanied by a change
in the historical content of Maurice’s courses. The historical questions on
Dale’s literature exams had always emphasized processes of transformation
that linked one period to the next. “What are the two principal features that
marked the conversion of Saxon into English?” he asks in . On the same
exam he asks students to “mention the four writers who contributed most
effectually to the formation and improvement of the English language in the
98The Invention of the Period Survey Course
fifteenth century.”35 Maurice by contrast asked synchronic questions, asking
students to recognize the characteristic stylistic or social attributes of a single
period. In an exam on Jacobean literature, he asks “In what respect do the
writings of Ben Jonson bear the impress of this period?” Teaching the Tudors
he asks, “Write an essay on the connection between the politics and the
literature of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.”36 The remarkably contemporary sound
of these questions, by contrast to Dale’s, has a lot to do with their insistence
on defining a period instead of tracing progress.
The net effect of these changes was to abandon the emphasis on
developmental unity that had, up to this point, anchored the English
curriculum. As I’ve already mentioned, Maurice had to face the same staffing
contraints Dale had confronted. Until , when he hired an assistant,
Maurice was the only professor of English at King’s College. Moreover,
Maurice was responsible for Modern History as well as English. If he chose
to teach Chaucer, or Poetry from Pope to Cowper, it meant in practice that
all other aspects of English literary history would be neglected for that term.
Nor did Maurice make an effort to reconstruct a developmental narrative by
linking terms together—say, by teaching courses in chronological order. If
the evidence of his exams is any indication, Maurice taught period surveys as
self-contained units, as if the comprehension of a single period could be, in
isolation, a meaningful educational goal.
It is worth asking how Maurice arrived at this conclusion, since there was
little or no precedent for it in the discipline. Fortunately Maurice published
a treatise about education in , Has the Church, or the State, the Power to
Educate the Nation? The book intervened in a debate that had grown acute
in the second half of the s, as radicals and Whigs put forward a series
of proposals to establish state supervision of schools (or, more ambitiously,
a secular system of national education). Maurice responded that modern
education must be at once a Christian and a national project, and implied that
the Established Church rather than the State should retain authority over it.
But the book’s relevance for the history of English studies comes not from
this thesis, but from the effort Maurice makes along the way to distinguish
between kinds of education appropriate for different classes. Maurice strives
to get ahead of secular reform proposals by proposing his own plan for the
education of the middle classes. University education, according to Maurice,
is properly restricted to the professions. A profession he defines as “that kind
of business which deals primarily with men as men, and is thus distinguished
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99
from a Trade which provides for the external wants or occasions of men.”37
In practice, he seems to be thinking of clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and
statesmen. In order to form men who possess “the secret of acting upon
the hearts and reason of men,” university education is concerned with the
universal attributes of human nature, and thus with Latin and Greek, as the
languages that best illustrate the universal principles of language as such.38
By contrast, the education of tradesmen and yeomen should be explicitly
national in character, emphasizing English language, literature, and
history. Maurice argues that the English middle classes need instruction
in literature in order to counteract a modern tendency for middle-class
interests to contract to the domain of immediate personal gain—prefiguring
an argument that would be made twenty years later and more famously by
Matthew Arnold. But Maurice describes the broadening power of literature
with a candor that has more in common with Pierre Bourdieu. The demand
for middle-class education, according to Maurice, is in effect a demand for
distinction (or “position,” as he puts it), founded on a sense “that it is a great
advantage to know a multitude of those things which soften the manners and
make the world respectable and refined.” But expressed as a vague longing
for refinement, this demand misses the vital secret of aristocratic distinction,
which depends above all on “a sense of connection with a family which has
preserved its honour through many generations.” Distinction, in other words,
depends on a sense of collective antiquity, and in order to satisfy middle-class
craving for distinction, education for tradesmen must provide an analogous
sense of national (and specifically middle-class) antiquity. Doing this will not
only assuage wounded pride, but genuinely enlarge middle-class interests to
encompass the nation. “The town spirit” may
present itself to you as a very mean, beggarly thing, living only in the moment,
unconnected with the past and the future. But the moment you bring the
townsman of one age to feel himself connected with the townsman of another
. . . that moment this meanness and narrowness disappear. The busy member
of the particular corporation . . . belongs to burghers of another day, his
corporation takes its place in the history of corporations, and bears upon the
life of the nation.39
In order to develop this sense of historical connection, Maurice recommends
that the children of tradesmen should attend middle schools where they study
English language, literature, and history. But he stresses that history should
100The Invention of the Period Survey Course
be presented in an unsystematic way, “giving no sort of course of history,
but bringing before them particular transactions or series of transactions,
illustrating them by the poetry of the period in which they occurred, and
attaching them so far as [the teacher] can to localities with which they are
themselves familiar.”40 In short, the goal will not be to transmit history as
a connected narrative, but simply to “bring the townsman of one age to
feel himself connected with the townsman of another,” in an imaginative
confrontation that leaps across the intervening centuries.
This plan closely resembles the curriculum Maurice designed the following
year, when he was hired to teach English and Modern History. Of course,
King’s College was not a middle school for tradesmen, and Maurice’s inaugural
lecture accordingly begins by conceding that his own disciplines should
be understood as subordinate (in this context) to the study of the classical
languages—which form, with Mathematics and Theology, “the ground-work
of a College education.” But when he does describe the English courses he
proposes to teach, he outlines a plan that is very similar to the one in his book.
Lectures in English will not take the form of a connected narrative; instead,
each term will be devoted “to the minute and critical study of some English
author; primarily for the purpose of getting acquainted with his language;
but secondarily, and by means of this, with the spirit of the book, with the
character of the author, and with the age in which he wrote.”41 Maurice’s book
had proposed to focus on “particular” historical “transactions,” illustrated by
the poetry of the age where they occurred; in this lecture, his focus falls more
specifically on individual authors. But the underlying imperative in both cases
is clearly that students should get “acquainted” with the language and spirit of
a particular vanished era. And this emphasis only became clearer in the early
s, as his English courses rapidly expanded to focus on periods rather than
individual authors.
Maurice’s inaugural lecture also interprets literary history in a way that
reinforces and expands the class-conscious rationale for English study he
had offered in Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation?
Maurice announces that his first course will focus on Chaucer because the
age of Chaucer dramatizes the essentially bourgeois foundation of English
nationality: “it is . . . to that age of England in which the middle class
began to appear, that we owe the recovery of our language, and with it the
commencement of our literature.” Moreover, he explains that the middle class
was (paradoxically) from its very origin a peculiarly historical class. “The
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
101
class which was rising up in England was never content to look upon itself
as a new class. It asserted its connexion with the oldest form of English life,”
for which reason the earliest expressions of English literature were chronicles
and histories.42 To return to the age of Chaucer in search of a middle-class
origin is thus to re-enact the backward-looking project of Chaucer’s own
age. In short, Maurice not only declines to transmit literary culture as a
continuous narrative, but affirms that English nationality itself has never
been transmitted as a continuous tradition. It has always been constituted,
from the very beginning, as an imaginative re-creation of a remote past.
It was crucial for the future of English studies that the transmission of
national culture should be defined as a task that depends on the vivid evocation
of vanished worlds. If literature plays a privileged role in late-nineteenthcentury debates about national culture, it is partly because Maurice’s premises
about education had come to be taken for granted. Culture could not be
transmitted simply through social continuity, or by historical narratives that
aimed to represent such continuity. Specific moments of the past had to be
resurrected and made to live for students, with a vividness that only literary
works could provide.
How, then, did Maurice arrive at his new model of education? In
one sense, I suppose I might answer that question simply by gesturing at
the previous chapters of this book, which have endeavored to show how
historical cultivation came to require a conscious embrace of historical
discontinuity. We have already seen novelists of the Regency era imagine
historical cultivation as a character’s discovery of the gaps and contrasts
that separate him from the past. We have seen Emma Willard argue that
instruction in history should teach students, not just to reproduce a dated
list, but to internalize a sense of historical “perspective” that highlights the
remoteness and obscurity of vanished eras. We have seen romantic catalog
poems represent history through disconnected, dizzying glimpses of widely
separated points in time. All of this background, certainly, is relevant to
the model of historical cultivation Maurice proposed in the s. But since
professors in the s had also, presumably, read Walter Scott and Felicia
Hemans, there remains an open question about the immediate trigger for
change in the early s. Why did the romantic impulse to cultivate historical
discontinuity shape Maurice’s educational practice when it hadn’t shaped the
teaching of his immediate predecessors?
One clue lies in Maurice’s tendency to represent historical cultivation as
102The Invention of the Period Survey Course
a cure for a specifically middle-class amnesia. This thesis had recently been
popularized by a pair of influential French historians, Augustin Thierry
and François Guizot. Thierry’s historical works of the s began to suggest
that there was a forgotten sort of valor in medieval burghers’ struggle for
independence. In Lettres sur l’histoire de France (nd ed., ), Thierry wrote
that “we have been long preceded, in the quest for civil liberty, by those
townsmen of the middle ages who six hundred years ago restored the walls
and the civilization of the ancient cities. . . . One must not imagine that the
middle classes or popular classes were born yesterday . . .”43 Guizot developed
this suggestion into a broadly-sketched history of civilization that identified
the middle classes with national self-consciousness, and explicitly dramatized
the need for a recovery of middle-class memory. Playing a prominent role
in French politics throughout his adult life, Guizot eventually served as
Prime Minister; in the s he was associated with the Doctrinaires, a group
of liberal royalist intellectuals. Thus, as Pierre Rosanvallon has explained,
Guizot’s history of the bourgeoisie was explicitly designed to encourage
middle-class political action. “In recovering this memory [of their past civic
role], they are invited to return to the origin of their political timidity in
order to overcome it.”44
Maurice cites both Thierry and Guizot in his later writings, and indeed it
would have been strange if a professor hired to teach Modern History in 
had not already browsed their works. Maurice’s writings of  and  don’t
directly cite, but do strongly echo Guizot in identifying the middle classes as
the source of English national identity, and in calling for a recovery of middleclass memory. They resemble Guizot as well in their habit of imagining
history as a face-to-face confrontation across the centuries that may, in
Maurice’s words, “bring the townsman of one age to feel himself connected
with the townsman of another.” The “Seventh Lecture” of Guizot’s History
of Civilization in Europe introduces the theme of middle-class history with a
passage that brilliantly dramatizes such a confrontation. Guizot first imagines
“a burgher of the twelfth century” visiting a French city in , where he
is confused by the Third Estate’s combination of bold rhetoric and military
weakness. He then invites his audience, “burghers of the nineteenth century,”
to return to the twelfth, in order to witness “a converse but absolutely parallel
double spectacle,” dramatizing the military valor but theoretical humility of
the medieval townsmen.45 Of course Walter Scott is the spirit who presides
over these scenes of vividly embodied historical tourism, and it is no accident
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
103
that the chapter proceeds to comment on Scott’s portrait of the bourgeoisie
in Quentin Durward. Thierry had also been profoundly influenced by Scott,
paying homage to the novelist in his greatest work, Histoire de la conquête
de l’Angleterre par les Normands (), both with an explicit tip of the hat in
the introduction, and by defining his own purpose throughout the history
as that of giving an embodied reality to historical abstractions. “One has to
pierce through to men,” he writes, “across the distance of centuries; one has
to imagine them alive and active on the land where today even the dust of
their bones has been lost; and it is for this reason that so many local details
and forgotten names have been included in this account.”46 For that matter,
Thierry and Guizot probably owe their specific interest in the history of
middle-class valor at least partly to Scott. Guizot criticizes Scott’s depiction
of a medieval townsman in Quentin Durward, and it’s true that Scott often
caricatures the bourgeoisie. But it’s also true, more broadly, that the revelation
at the heart of Scott’s best novels always involves the surprisingly heroic role
that apparently unheroic people have played in history, and although a fair
amount of the limelight goes to the landed gentry, the middle classes often (as
in Rob Roy and The Heart of Midlothian) come in for their share of it.
The evidence suggests, in short, that Maurice’s invention of the
“period survey” was shaped by broader trends in early-nineteenth-century
historiography, and especially by a kind of historiography that sought to
compete with the historical novel in vividly recreating the social life of a
vanished era. Some aspects of Maurice’s theory of culture—including his
emphasis on the middle classes’ need for a history of their own—seem to
have been drawn specifically from French historians of the 182s and s,
who gave the bourgeoisie a role even more prominent than it had played in
Scott. But Maurice’s more enduring innovation was simply his emphasis on
the educational necessity of imagining the life of a particular era in intimate
and vivid detail—at the expense of an older educational model that had
emphasized continuity and progression. While this shift of emphasis is
something Maurice could have picked up from Thierry or Guizot, he could
just as easily have absorbed it from English essayists—for instance, from
Thomas Macaulay’s well-known  review essay that defined “the perfect
historian” as “he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited
in miniature,” from “the crowds of the exchange and the coffee-house” to “the
convivial table and the domestic hearth.” Of course, this essay is well-known
among literary critics largely because Macaulay gives Scott credit for teaching
104The Invention of the Period Survey Course
historians how this should be done, and suggests that “a truly great historian
would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated.”47 So in a
sense it doesn’t greatly matter whether Maurice spent his time reading English
or French historians. In the s and s, both sides of the Channel were
celebrating a kind of history that sought to vividly reconstruct the everyday
life of a single vanished era. This ideal of historical comprehension had been
emerging (as Mark Salber Phillips has shown) for many decades, but it owed
its celebrity in the s and s above all to the novels of Scott.48 Universities
seem to have modeled their curricula on it a decade or so after its authority
was established among writers of history.
Another reason to believe that Maurice’s “period surveys” respond to
recent historiographical trends can be found in the teaching of history
itself. British professors of history seem to have shifted toward a periodized
curriculum at almost exactly the same time as professors of English. At King’s
College, this conjunction is hardly surprising, since Maurice united in himself
the disciplines of English and Modern History. But  was also a transitional
year at the local rival, University College, where Edward Creasy was hired to
teach ancient and modern history just as Maurice was being hired at King’s.
Creasy’s inaugural lecture proposed to reorganize the historical curriculum
around period-centered courses, very much as Maurice was reorganizing the
literary curriculum. Creasy explains that the historical lecturer has to dwell
on a single period at length in order to depict all the social and intellectual
dimensions of a vanished era.
[H]e who sympathizes with his predecessors on the earth, and desires from
their fate to foresee and fashion his own, will feel how vain it would be to
attempt this without making himself thoroughly acquainted, not only with
their names, their countries, but with the whole circumstances of the political
and social state in which they moved and had their being. Now it is obvious
that to develope this spirit in lecturing, so much only must be lectured on as
can be fully and freely investigated.49
University College has not, like King’s College, preserved detailed records
of courses and exams from the s and s, but we can get a glimpse of
Creasy’s pedagogical practice from slightly later records. In , for instance,
he offered a course on the reign of Henry the Third; in  he offered a course
on Greek History, a course on Roman History, and a third course on the reign
of Elizabeth. Creasy’s periodized courses contrast strikingly with the more
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
105
sweeping plans laid out by his predecessors. Benjamin H. Malkin, hired to
teach history in , had eschewed “details” and proposed instead to “make
a judicious selection of those leading facts connected with the improvement
of mankind, whether in periods more remote, or nearer to his own time.”50
Robert Vaughan, hired in , had proposed to cover “the whole space which
precedes the age of Luther” in one course, embracing multiple nations, and
including everything from “Mohammedan religion” to “Charles the Fifth.”
The three centuries after Luther would provide material for a second course.51
Creasy’s courses on the reign of a single monarch represented a significant
divergence from previous practice, and the divergence was self-conscious. “In
a word,” Creasy declared, “I think it is better to treat a short subject thoroughly
and exhaustively than a longer and more ambitious theme in a more cursory
and superficial manner.”52
Similar transitions seem to have taken place in other institutions around
the same time. In the early nineteenth century, modern history was not an
examination subject at Oxford or Cambridge. It was covered in a cursory
way by a Regius Professorship that was something of a sinecure; the Regius
Professor of Modern History often gave a set of inaugural lectures and then,
effectively, disappeared. But these inaugural lectures—for whatever they’re
worth as evidence—do again suggest that the necessity of tightly periodized
study began to be acknowledged in the s. The lectures up to and including
Thomas Arnold’s in  each offer, in effect, a full survey of world history.
But J. A. Cramer, in , proposes a set of four separate courses, each of
which focuses narrowly on a single period of crisis, and in some cases on
a single historical document. He insists that historical study needs to be
“circumscribed within certain limits; lest, by attempting too much, we obtain
only general and superficial results, and no clear and definite notion of any
one period.”53 In short, the professors who taught modern history in the first
four decades of the nineteenth century emphasized continuous progress, as
professors of English did in the s—and like professors of English, they
tried to cover the whole sweep of modern history in one or two terms. But
around , or shortly thereafter, a shift took place in both disciplines,
producing a curriculum that sacrificed continuity in order to dwell in more
depth on periods of thirty or fifty years.
At the end of the s and beginning of the s, a number of writers
used a similar model of history to frame a new discourse of social criticism,
which addressed contemporary problems by setting the present in a tautly
106The Invention of the Period Survey Course
contrastive relationship to a particular, often remote historical moment.
A. W. N. Pugin’s Contrasts () dramatizes the contrastive strategy in a visual
way: each pair of facing pages in the book contains on the left, a presentday building, and on the right, a building from the fourteenth or fifteenth
centuries with a parallel function. The contrast is intended to illustrate “the
present decay of taste,” and the book indeed helped spark a revival of Gothic
architecture.54 Thomas Carlyle attempted something loosely similar in Past
and Present (), contrasting the present condition of England against the
abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in the twelfth century, and inviting the reader to
glimpse in the medieval abbey a spirit of leadership and labor needful in the
present. In asking twelfth- and eighteenth-century townsmen to trade places,
and thereby discover the middle classes’ forgotten military valor, François
Guizot made a similar critical gesture, which Maurice echoes in Has the
Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? But Maurice’s project
runs in some ways perpendicular to these other examples. Instead of using a
specific historical era to expound a solution to present-day problems, Maurice
suggests that historical specificity itself is the solution, because specificity
itself will awaken students to a sense of their membership in a community
that transcends time.
The facts of a particular history are those which awaken the historical feeling,
are those which make a boy feel that he is connected with acts and events
which passed hundreds of years ago, thousands of miles away. The spirit of a
particular poem, is that which awakens the poetical spirit in answer to it, and
makes him feel that the thoughts and feelings of men who lived hundreds of
years ago, and thousands of miles away are his thoughts and feelings. If you
would desire him ever to enter into the laws and principles of history, ever to
understand the meaning and nature of poetry, you must first give him this
living interest in both; this is the preparation, and, if he never goes further,
he has something which will stay by him, something which has become part
of his own being.55
It is worth noting that in this passage Maurice has little to say about
nationality. Elsewhere in the same volume, he does suggest that the point
of empathy with “men who lived hundreds of years ago” is specifically to
give the middle classes a sense of national heritage. But here those men are
also “thousands of miles away,” and the emphasis of the passage falls less
on British nationality than on the general paradox that men can achieve a
sense of transhistorical community by immersing themselves in historical
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
107
particularity. There is not a contradiction here but a duality. The development
of national consciousness was important to Maurice, but he also stresses
that understanding oneself as a member of a nation matters above all as a
way of coming to understand the broader fellowship of a human “family we
declare to be universal, limited by no conditions of time or country,” which
he identifies with an ecumenical Christian Church.56 To be sure, ecumenical
Christianity is not the same thing as humanism, and it may be tempting to
read the invocation of spiritual fellowship as boilerplate: a decorative swag of
high-minded universalism draped across a fundamentally national project.
But given the cast of Maurice’s mind, this would be a mistake. His model of
historical cultivation has to be understood at once as a nationalist and as a
more broadly spiritual project.
To understand the religious dimension of Maurice’s invention, the period
survey, we perhaps need to turn to the most notorious part of his career as a
teacher. Maurice was let go from King’s College in  for teaching ideas “of
a dangerous tendency, and calculated to unsettle the minds of the theological
students of King’s College.”57 As well as teaching English literature and
modern history, Maurice was by the end of the s a teacher of theology, and
the Theological Essays he published in  interpreted Christian doctrines of
immortal life and eternal punishment in a sense that outraged the evangelical
wing of the Anglican church. Maurice believed that God’s love was the center
of Christian theology, and like many nineteenth-century Christians, he had
difficulty reconciling that idea with the expectation that God would commit
most men and women to everlasting torment after death. His response to
this dilemma hinged on rethinking the meaning of two phrases that appear
in the New Testament: “eternal life” and “eternal death.” The Greek word
translated here as “eternal” is aionios. Maurice concluded that it is a mistake
to translate aionios as “everlasting” or “endless.” Something everlasting
begins, and then goes on forever. Something eternal, on the other hand, is
really outside of time. Maurice argued that the notion of everlasting future
punishment mixes the idea of time and duration up with something that is
really deeper than time: the eternal death implied by separation from the
love of God. Separation from God is an inherent punishment that takes place
in the eternal dimension of the present moment; it is not deferred to some
future state. The corollary to that, of course, is that we don’t necessarily
have to imagine a God who springs nasty surprises on Judgment Day.
Conservative Anglicans concluded that this philosophy of time was a fancy
108The Invention of the Period Survey Course
way of sneaking in the heretical notion that all mankind would someday be
redeemed, and they convinced the president of the college to remove Maurice
from his post.
Maurice’s theory of eternity was no doubt determined by a number of
intersecting motivations, including the tender-mindedness about punishment
that his evangelical critics had scented. But one also discerns a recurring
pattern in his thought about time—a pattern that had already shaped his
reflections on history and on the temporality of an individual life. In each
of these domains, Maurice came to feel that it was important to distinguish
true permanence—a timeless dimension that can connect apparently distant
moments—from mere consecutive duration. There’s a passage in one of
Maurice’s letters that perfectly illustrates the analogy. It describes a visit to
the British Museum in May . “They” in the first sentence are his children,
Freddy and Edmund.
They both went to the British Museum this morning, and my mother,
who has been reading Layard and longing to see the Nineveh wonders, joined
us there. I think she has as much sympathy with the old world as any of us,
perhaps more. But she reminded me of the last time we were in the museum
together. We went with John and Susan and Annie, Carlyle and ——,
so that the monuments of generations gone by bring one’s own history up
surprisingly.
The distance seems as great or as little in each case. Oh! it is surely true
that there is no distance. The spiritual world is not under these time laws. If
we were free from sin we should be under no check from them . . .58
In this passage, “sympathy with the old world” is analogous to immortal life;
it offers a way of overcoming the laws of time and eternalizing experience.
That promise of eternity is rendered palpable by déjà vu that maps a
disorienting moment of personal nostalgia onto the historical alterity of
“the Nineveh wonders.” Saying that “the distance seems as great or little in
each case” evokes a temporality that cannot be measured by a timeline or by
continuous narrative. Maurice’s reconstruction of literary pedagogy in the
s strove for a similar kind of transcendence. Professors of the s had
tried to communicate national culture through narratives of “progressive
development” that, like the vulgar conception of heaven, had a determinate
beginning and indefinite duration. Maurice asked students to discover a truer
kind of permanence in a point-to-point relationship with a distant historical
period. One could characterize this as an intimation of collective immortality,
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
109
a way of glimpsing the permanence of human community in an apparently
fleeting historical moment.
Maurice was a theologian as well as a teacher of English, and it is perhaps
not surprising that his innovations in literary-historical pedagogy should be
connected to reflections on immortality. But I want to suggest that a broader
pattern was at work here, one that extended beyond Maurice and indeed
beyond the discipline of English studies. In the early s, many other
writers were describing this sort of tightly periodized historical empathy as
a mode of immortality. The metaphor was not novel; as previous chapters
of this book have argued, poets had been associating historical difference
with immortality since the middle of the eighteenth century, in an effort to
define a mode of collective permanence that didn’t depend on the continuity
of tradition. But it was unusual for historians to take this metaphor seriously,
and I think it’s especially notable that they did so as they were abandoning
continuous narrative in order to write (or teach) a more tightly periodized
kind of history.
Carlyle’s Past and Present, for instance, culminates in a famous scene of
exhumation, as the Abbot Samson and twelve chosen brethren reverently
remove St. Edmund’s body from its resting place and verify its miraculous
incorruption. This drama of antiquarian hero-worship rather clearly parallels
the reader’s relationship to Samson himself, and Richard Schoch has suggested
that it may be “a meta-historiographical moment in which [Carlyle] reveals
how history ought to be written. . . . The historian’s task, we are instructed,
is to restore the past in its bodily integrity. . . .”59 The exhumation of a
miraculously undecayed body is not quite the same thing as immortal life, of
course, but it may be as close to permanence as one can come in a universe of
stern Carlylean grotesquerie. Moreover, the chapter following the exhumation
does hint at an abstract kind of resurrection by suggesting that the function
of history is to strip away an “integument” of “Formulas become dead” in
order to reveal the original living reality.60 This would appear to be Carlyle’s
materialist version of Maurice’s effort to imagine the British Museum as a
place truly outside of time. The fact that Carlyle had accompanied Maurice to
the museum on the very visit he recalls so fondly is a coincidence, of course,
although a pleasant one.
Edward Creasy, who introduced period surveys to the historical curriculum
at University College, was not given to abstract spirituality, like Maurice, or
overt grotesquerie, like Carlyle. But Creasy resembled both men in suggesting
110The Invention of the Period Survey Course
that the historical sympathy evoked by periodization would lead ultimately
to a negation of time. In the same inaugural lecture where he argues for the
necessity of tightly periodized courses, he remarks “I believe that we should
find the best clue to the successful employment of Imaginative energy lies
in thinking, as much as possible in the Present tense, and not in the Past of
every great historical crisis.” Like Maurice, Creasy implies that the ultimate
moral purpose of history is to frame an enlarged, timeless conception of
human community, producing “a common interest, a fellow-feeling in the
thoughts, the words, the actions, and the fates of the human beings removed
from us by the lapse of years.” And like Maurice, he hints that this exercise
of historical sympathy will negate time and death, “raising up the spirits of
former times.” “Unless you can thus feel and think, unless you can thus bid
the cold chronicles become ‘Thoughts that breathe and words that burn,’ and
call up before the eye and heart, the men and manners of former times, the
study is flat and unprofitable. . . .”61 In different ways, Creasy, Carlyle, and
Maurice were all advancing a model of historical time where the present is
bound to the past, not by continuous tradition or progress, but by an exercise
of historical imagination that leaps over differences of place, time, and culture
to establish a human community whose timeless scope is dramatized by the
very differences it negates.
Previous chapters of this book have traced a paradoxical connection
between historical change and immortality in writers from Walter Scott
to Felicia Hemans. Drawing partly on Emile Durkheim, I have argued that
these visions of immortality were at bottom fantasies about the permanence
of collective life, expressing a longing for a kind of permanence that might
somehow be founded on the very changes that seemed to make earthly
community ephemeral. At times, my argument up to this point has leaned on
the Durkheimian presupposition that immortality is, almost by definition,
a collective state. But by the beginning of the s, this presupposition is
no longer necessary, because the latent content of poetic fantasy has become
entirely explicit in historical prose. Writers like Maurice, Creasy, and Carlyle
describe historical imagination, more or less literally, as a resurrection of
the dead. The figure has become so familiar to us now that it conveys little
more than vague antiquarian piety, or perhaps even—as I’ll suggest in the
final chapter—nostalgia for a defunct model of culture. But around  the
metaphor still had a polemical edge: it celebrated a tightly periodized mode
of historical empathy, and championed it against older modes of historical
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
111
writing, and teaching, that had sought to trace continuities and demonstrate
progression. In texts from this period, the metaphor of immortality is
bound up specifically with a new mode of historical cultivation founded on
discontinuity.
In the careers of Maurice and Creasy, the metaphor of immortality was
also linked, intriguingly, to the emergence of a curricular structure that
remains dominant today—the period survey. It’s not clear, however, that
this connection should license us in drawing many conclusions about the
cultural significance of contemporary curricula. Higher education operates at
a different scale in the twenty-first-century than it did in the nineteenth, and
with a different social mandate. Institutions and academic disciplines now
feel that their legitimacy depends on the production of specialized research at
least as much as it does on general education. And in literature departments,
at least, the periodized curriculum has become deeply interwoven with
a research-generating system that governs professional communication
and graduate education, as well as hiring and promotion. This system of
incentives would probably continue to sustain a periodized curriculum even
if professors lost all faith in the theories of cultivation that originally governed
its emergence. It seems likely, in fact, that a transition of that kind has already
taken place.
In the period from  to , however, there was little pressure for
scholars to specialize in a single period, and English departments (where
they even existed) were rarely staffed by more than one or two people. So the
success of the period survey in these decades cannot easily be explained as a
consequence of professional specialization. Where period surveys flourished,
they flourished because professors felt this was the best way for students to
absorb literary history. And they did flourish. First, around , they swept the
London universities. I have focused on literary examples from King’s College,
and historical examples from University College, but the transformation of the
curriculum affected both disciplines at both institutions. At King’s College,
Maurice taught modern history as well as English, and his historical courses
became as tightly periodized as his literary ones. At University College, R. G.
Latham was hired to teach English in , and like his colleague Creasy in
history, he seems to have proposed periodized courses on (for instance) “The
Dramatists of the Elizabethan Age” and “English Poetry under the Stuarts.”62
There were moments of reversion to an older plan: in –, after Maurice
left King’s College, his immediate successor, George Webbe Dasent, taught a
112The Invention of the Period Survey Course
course on “The Rise and Development of the English Language and Literature
After the Norman Conquest,” which sounds like a course from the s.
But the very next year, Dasent was replaced by John Sherman Brewer, who
had been a lecturer under Maurice, and taught tightly periodized courses
very much on the plan Maurice had introduced.63 The discipline of Modern
History was taken over at the same time by Charles H. Pearson, who had been
one of Maurice’s students. Pearson wrote a long letter to the Principal of the
College explicitly defending the emphasis on periodization in the curriculum
he and Brewer had collectively designed.64 The picture at University College
is more complex, because their department experienced considerably more
turnover. A period-centered approach seems to have waxed and waned at
times in the s and s. But Henry Morley, who held the English chair from
 to  and left a deep impression on literary study in Britain, came down
on the side of a clearly periodized curriculum. Morley’s exams suggest that he
sought above all to produce students who could recognize a period style, and
distinguish writers of different eras on that basis.65 Morley, incidentally, had
studied at King’s College, and had begun his teaching career at King’s College
at the end of the s, serving as a lecturer under Maurice’s old lecturer
Brewer. There is, in short, fairly strong evidence that Maurice’s innovation
was a decisive moment in the institutional history of literary study; it shaped
a curricular model that endured at King’s College and eventually came to
dominate University College as well. When Oxford and Cambridge formed
their English schools later in the century, they too adopted a periodized
curriculum.
Period style continued to play a central role in literary pedagogy from
the second half of the nineteenth century through much of the twentieth.
In the concept of period style, late-nineteenth-century aestheticism merges
with romantic historicism, which had used literature’s evocative power to
immortalize vanished social systems. Subjective and social approaches to
art unite in the deeply appealing conceit that individual aesthetic cultivation
dramatizes the timeless dimension of history. Because of this synergy
between an aestheticism that emphasizes style, and a mode of historicism
that emphasizes the evocation of specific vanished moments, the practice
of periodization has exerted a more pervasive, systematic, and enduring
influence on literary studies than on the discipline of history itself. I have
noted that professors of history at London universities shifted, around ,
from long surveys emphasizing world-historical progress to shorter courses
The Invention of the Period Survey Course
113
that sought to evoke a specific era. But since historians were striving to cover
multiple national traditions, their period designations still remained looser
than those in English. In , for instance, Edward Creasy covered “English
History, from the Time of Alfred to the Elizabethan Age.” His colleagues in
English would have broken this rubric down into smaller (dynasty-sized)
courses designed to evoke a unitary cultural moment. Moreover, historians’
period-centered courses often had to compete with courses organized around
causal problems. In the same year, Creasy offered a course on “The History of
Slavery, Ancient and Modern, Oriental, European, African, and American:—
on the Causes of Slavery, and on its Effects on Slaves, on Slaveholders, and
on non-Slaveholding Freemen.”66 The evocation of period mattered to Creasy,
but so did comparative social analysis, and questions of causality. Throughout
the twentieth century, historians likewise remained willing to subordinate
periodization, when necessary, to the ad-hoc boundaries of a causal problem.
In English departments, by contrast, the evocation of period became an
overriding disciplinary mission, and produced a periodizing scheme that has
remained remarkably unaltered by other revolutions in the profession. By the
s, departments of English at American universities had already begun to
offer courses in a standard set of periods that would remain extremely familiar
to twenty-first-century professors: “English Romanticism,” “Elizabethan
Drama,” and “Eighteenth-Century Literature,” just to give a few examples of
courses from Yale and Columbia in the first half of the s.67 In the course
of the subsequent century, schools of critical theory came and went, while the
overall scale and structure of periodization remained largely unchanged. Our
narratives about literary studies emphasize critical theory, since at first glance
that appears to be where the drama and conflict of the profession are located.
But backing up to take the long view of institutional history, one could
argue that the drama and conflict have been operating, all the while, in the
service of a periodizing imperative that has remained unchallenged since its
emergence in the nineteenth century because it is perceived as indispensable
to the discipline’s cultural mission.
4
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization,
and a Forgotten Challenge to It (1886 –1949)
T
h e e n g l i s h l i t e r a r y cu r r i culum changed remarkably
slowly in the twentieth century. One can page through catalogs
from  and find courses that bear exactly the same titles today: “English
Romanticism,” “Elizabethan Drama.” To be sure, departments of English
now teach more American and postcolonial literature than they did in the
early twentieth century. But the organizing grid of period and nationality itself has remained (at least until quite recently) undisturbed by the addition
of new content. Even more surprisingly, it has been undisturbed by a series
of epochal struggles over the very definition of the discipline. Philology gave
way to literary history, which gave way to New Criticism, and to poststructuralism—but none of those transitions seriously challenged the curricular
primacy of the period survey course.
My goal in this chapter is to explain the curious stability of that
institution. In a fractious discipline that repeatedly redefined the purpose of
literary instruction, and especially the relationship between literature and
history, how could the organizing function of “literary periods” have gone
unchallenged?
If it actually had gone unchallenged, this would be a difficult question to
answer. But the primacy of the period has always been challenged by alternative
curricular models. In fact, the history of literary studies has been if anything
more turbulent and surprising than standard histories suggest: course catalogs
from the early twentieth century make absolutely startling reading, full
114
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
115
of ambitious courses on the history of journalism, and strange disciplinary
projects like “General Literatology” that are now entirely forgotten. The
periodized curriculum has been curiously stable, not because no one thought
to challenge it—but because institutional challenges have never displaced
periodization in a significant, enduring way. In the first half of the twentieth
century, comparative philology, comparative literature, and the history of
ideas each threatened to shift the focus of debate from discrete “periods” and
“movements” to processes of development. In the middle of the twentieth
century, it seemed for a while that theories of genre (guided by archetypal or
structuralist premises) might become more important than chronology. Each
of these movements made significant inroads in the curriculum, and then
retreated, leaving the organizing grid of period and nationality unshaken.
This pattern suggests that periodization has fulfilled some important but
poorly articulated social function. Periodization has been no one’s conscious
ideal: when periods become a subject of explicit debate, their limitations
are always acknowledged. Alternative curricular plans have frequently been
proposed. But somehow, the alternatives never take root in a way that makes
them seem educationally indispensable. And somehow it always does remain
indispensable to offer courses on “romanticism” or “modernism.” The opacity
of this phenomenon suggests that it rests on a social foundation not fully
articulated as conscious belief.
This chapter will examine one alternative curricular model, and ask
why it failed, in order to cast light on the social forces that have made
periodization such a resilient institution. In the process, I hope to illuminate
some interesting and poorly-understood passages of disciplinary history. I’ll
focus on a loosely-defined initiative that flourished in early twentieth-century
America (–), under the names “literary theory,” “general literature,”
or “comparative literature.” At least two of these phrases are familiar, but few
people realize that they have an institutional history running back to the dawn
of the twentieth century. In , for instance, Richard Moulton’s title at the
University of Chicago was “Professor of Literary Theory and Interpretation”;
he headed a department of “General Literature” that announced “the Theory
of Literature” and “Comparative Literature” as its central subjects.1 In certain
ways contemporary scholars have more in common with Moulton’s historicist
goals than we do with the better-known New Critical figures of mid-century.
So it may be time for us to revisit the early-twentieth-century discipline, and
ask what “literary theory” meant before it was overrun by critics.
116The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
The Theoretical Ambitions of Comparative Literature
The history of “comparative literature” is widely misunderstood. Even if
scholars are aware that it existed in the late ninteenth century, they generally
prefer to trace their genealogy back to well-known, charismatic figures like
René Wellek or Eric Auerbach. In a recent book about the discipline, for
instance, Gayatri Spivak says confidently that “Comparative Literature was
a result of European intellectuals fleeing ‘totalitarian’ regimes.”2 Taken
literally, this is simply not true. There were already American departments
of comparative literature in the first decade of the twentieth century—for
instance at Harvard, at Columbia, and at the University of Chicago. These
departments were not founded by refugees from totalitarianism, or by
European emigrés at all.
On the other hand, Spivak’s statement is not quite as false as it appears,
because the persistence of the phrase “comparative literature” does paper over
a significant conceptual shift. At the beginning of the the twentieth century,
“comparative” was not yet a synonym for “international”: scholars often
published works of “comparative literature” that discussed a single national
tradition. The second volume of Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature,
for instance, was Chivalry in English Literature: Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, and
Shakespeare ().3 Moreover, departments of English—for instance at the
University of California—could offer “Seminars in the Comparative Study of
Literature” that were occasionally restricted to the works of a single author.4
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, “comparative literature”
was defined by its theoretical ambitions—especially by its aspiration to
explain (rather than merely describe) processes of literary change. The
international scope we associate with “comp lit” was initially a consequence of
this (literally “comparative”) mission; it wasn’t yet the fundamental definition
of the discipline. The broadly theoretical character of the comparative
project allowed it to challenge periodization in two senses. First, obviously,
comparative literature could undermine the national context that is taken
for granted when we talk about “Elizabethan” or “Victorian” literature. But
because comparatists sought to explain continuous processes of development,
they also, more interestingly, challenged the whole underlying notion that
literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.
This chapter will focus on scholarly and pedagogical developments
between  and . In , H. M. Posnett’s book Comparative Literature
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
117
coined the title phrase and called for new courses of study to be established at
leading universities. By the first decade of the twentieth century, many such
departments had been created. But by the s, the growth curve had turned
negative: few new departments of “comparative literature” were being born,
and several free-standing departments either disappeared (as at the University
of Chicago) or were absorbed into “English and Comparative Literature” (as
at Columbia). The fortunes of the discipline revived after the Second World
War, but by that point comparative literature had grown closer to other forms
of literary study—in particular, by accepting periodization as a fundamental
organizing principle. So for my purposes the forgotten period between  and
 is most interesting. In this era, comparative literature was an ambitious,
quasi-anthropological project that sought to frame a general theory of literary
development. Why didn’t a project of that kind leave more enduring traces in
the curriculum? How did it come to seem, self-evidently, a dead end? Why is
it now not even remembered by many leading comparatists?
H. M. Posnett’s Comparative Literature is an early and impressive example
of scholarship in this tradition. It appeared in an “International Scientific
Series” published by Kegan Paul, and openly proposed to apply “historical
science to Literature.” For Posnett, this meant above all that the concept of
literature should be subjected to a thoroughgoing historical relativism. The
critic must recognize, not only that standards of literary merit vary from age
to age, but that there is no single, stable definition of “literature” itself. “The
separation of imagination from experience, of didactic purpose from aesthetic
pleasure” that might have seemed to define literature in the nineteenth
century are recent inventions, limited to societies that have undergone “the
economic development known as ‘division of labor.’” The epic, dramatic, and
lyric modes cannot be viewed as universal categories. “[C]ountries widely
removed from European culture possess such forms as no European language
can correctly express, because among no European people have they been
developed.”5
Posnett does give the literatures of China and India sustained attention,
but he also proceeds to offer a general theory of literary history that will
strike contemporary readers as an example of the very universalism he
warns against. Roughly, Posnett traces a steady expansion of the social group
(from the clan, to the city commonwealth, to the nation and/or religious
community with universalizing aspirations). Each of these social forms
produces its own characteristic mode of expression, implying different kinds
118The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
of human personality and different relationships to physical nature. The city
commonweath, for instance, “allows dramatic analysis of character its fullest
scope.”6 This developmental scheme is influenced by Herbert Spencer and has
a teleological bent. In spite of his professed relativism, Posnett tacitly implies
that European “national literature” is the most advanced form of expression.
In short, Comparative Literature has its limits and constitutive
contradictions. But they are quite different from the limits of late-twentiethcentury comparative literature. The most obvious contrast between the two
projects is simply the scope of the earlier one. By the s, comparatists
were typically concerned to trace parallels between several modern national
literatures. Comparative literature was in effect an international version of the
same historical/critical project that scholars were pursuing within national
literature departments. Posnett’s goal had been quite different: it was to
explain the transformation of the concept of literature itself, from pre-literate
folklore to the present. Working on this scale, there could be no question
of “periodization” in the usual sense: Comparative Literature includes no
chapters on romanticism or on Elizabethan drama. The book does identify
broad stages of development—the clan, the city commonwealth—but
these are explanatory categories organized by substantive social principles,
rather than periods organized by chronology. The same thing held true in
the works of Posnett’s successors. In his  attempt to produce a textbook
of comparative literature, for instance, Alastair Mackenzie distinguished
“primitive,” “barbaric,” “autocratic,” and “democratic” phases of literary
development.7
One could say that this made “comparative literature” more akin to a
social science than to literary criticism. Mackenzie, for instance, refers to
“that branch of anthropology which is commonly known as literature,” and
traces continuities between literature, folklore, and myth.8 But it would be
equally fair to characterize the comparative project as an early attempt to
move literature departments in the direction of “theory,” and at the beginning
of the twentieth century, “literary theory” was in fact almost a synonym for
“comparative literature.” The connection may be surprising, since we have
recently tended to oppose “theory” and “history” as alternate paths for literary
study, and the works of these early comparatists were nothing if not historical.
But in the early twentieth century, the historical part of literary study seemed
to be precisely the part of the discipline suited to theoretical generalization.
Charles Darwin had recently elevated biology from a descriptive science to a
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
119
science of change; anthropologists like James Frazer had likewise moved from
collections of folklore toward laws of social change. It seemed logical that
literary scholarship would advance from descriptive literary history toward
a theory of The Evolution of Literature, to borrow the title of Mackenzie’s 
textbook.
Mackenzie represents the comparative project at its most scientific: he not
only proposes “provisional laws” of “literary evolution” but tries to rename
literary study “literatology,” on the model of “anthropology.” Few other
writers were willing to go quite that far. But the broader goal of developing
literary history into a theory of cultural change was widespread in turn-ofthe-century scholarship, and many of the period’s well-known intellectuals
moonlighted as scholars of “comparative literature” when they were pursuing
it. Compared to quasi-anthropologists like Posnett and Mackenzie, George
Santayana’s relation to literature was relatively belletristic. He approached
poetry as a vehicle for philosophy (his own home discipline), not as a reflection
of social structure. But Santayana’s lectures on literary history were published
as Volume  of Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, and they do share
the comparatists’ interest in tracing large patterns of cultural development:
“Lucretius, Dante and Goethe,” for instance, “sum up the chief phases of
European philosophy,—naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism.”9
Irving Babbitt, to take another example, hardly aspired to be a social
scientist. Books like Literature and the American College () represented,
on the contrary, a reaction against the specialization and professionalization
of literary study. But in The New Laokoon (), Babbitt presents himself as
a scholar of comparative literature, in order to articulate a sweeping theory
of cultural change. Perhaps most tellingly, Babbitt contrasts his model of
“comparative literature” to a more popular version of the discipline:
Many people are inclined to see in the popularity of this new subject a
mere university fad. They will not be far wrong unless it can become
something more than an endless study of sources and influences and minute
relationships. Neo-classicism and romanticism are both world-movements.
It should be the ambition of the student of comparative literature to make all
attempts to define these movements in terms of one literature seem one-sided
and ill-informed.10
Babbitt’s advice for students of comparative literature will probably seem
self-evident to contemporary readers. Of course, the task of the comparatist
120The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
is to frame an international definition of movements like “classicism” and
“romanticism.” But we should attend to Babbitt’s hectoring tone, which
suggests that defining periods and movements (as opposed to broad structuring
principles of cultural history) was not yet a primary concern for comparatists.
Instead, as Babbitt’s account suggests, the “university fad” of comparative
literature was commonly expressed through influence-hunting and sourcestudy. A synoptic account of literary development from preliterate times to
the present may have been the discipline’s ultimate goal, but in practice most
scholars contributed to it by patiently accumulating evidence of particular
causal connections. I’m stressing the “causal” character of these connections
because early-twentieth-century literary scholars proudly emphasized it
themselves. Between  and , for instance,  article titles in PMLA
mentioned “source(s)” or “influence(s).” (By contrast, in the same span
of time between  and , only three titles in PMLA mentioned either
term.) To be sure, only a fraction of this influence-hunting was carried out
by scholars with a formal appointment in comparative literature. But Babbitt
was not alone in seeing the quest for “sources and influences and minute
relationships” as a symptom of the comparative “fad.” It would be equally true
to flip the statement around and say that early-twentieth-century enthusiasm
for “comparative literature” was itself a symptom of a broader impulse to make
literary study a discipline with an explanatory rather than merely descriptive
mission. This is what scholars meant when they called for literary study to
become “scientific,” and tracing connections in literary history seemed to be
a way to achieve that sort of explanatory force.
Comparatists were not alone in this belief, but they understood their
discipline as peculiarly dedicated to the study of continuity—whether across
national, linguistic, or temporal boundaries. Other scholars might trace
influences, but influence and continuity were the whole substance of the
comparative project. In , the catalog copy for Chicago’s department of
“General Literature” put this rather beautifully:
The Department of General Literature has for its purpose the study of
literature as an organic whole. Literary influences transcend the limits of
language and of nationality, and persist through the centuries. The thought
and purpose of one writer may find rebirth in another of different speech
and of a different age. Particular literary motives pass on from land to land,
gathering a vigorous individual life. Literary types crystallize and reappear,
fortified or limited by reminiscence.11
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
121
“Reminiscence” and “rebirth” suggest that literature’s transcendence of
national and temporal boundaries may constitute a kind of immortality.
Appropriately enough, the theme of immortality is fortified by a faint echo
of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (“I pass like night from land to land / I have
strange power of speech.”)
The Curricular Limits of the Comparative Project
I have already hinted that early-twentieth-century comparatism failed to
become immortal in at least one sense: its central concern with continuity—
with the tracing of sources and influences—is no longer shared by many
scholars. What happened to that project? It would be tempting to approach
the question intellectually, by examing critiques of influence and continuity
in late-twentieth-century scholarship. But that sort of intellectual contrast
would be almost certain to reaffirm our own assumptions, since it allows us
to rehearse established rationales for doing what we currently do.
Moreover, a strictly intellectual approach would neglect the significance
of the broader institutional pattern I sketched in the introduction to this
chapter: the persistence of the period survey course over more than a century
and a half, in spite of a long and varied series of challenges. Early-twentiethcentury comparatists’ emphasis on “continuity” was one of those unsuccessful
challenges to periodization, and its similarity to other short-lived projects
suggests that we may not have to search too far to understand why the tracing
of sources and influences is no longer central to literary study. Scholarly
projects can survive, and even flourish, in the face of devastating intellectual
critique. But projects that aren’t institutionalized as courses will sooner or
later disappear, because they have to be sustained by unremunerated labor. So
the first question we should ask is this: How successful were early-twentiethcentury comparatists at giving their project a curricular embodiment?
In one sense they were very successful: at many institutions, they managed
to create their own departments. This is more than can be said, for instance,
of philology. Even when philology was at the peak of its late-nineteenthcentury prestige, studies of language and literature tended to fuse in a single
department. Because comparatists often worked across linguistic boundaries,
they had no obvious disciplinary home, and could plausibly demand their
own department. (Philology was similarly able to break away at institutions—
like Harvard—where it embraced the rubric of “comparative philology.”)
122The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
The first flush of programs in “General Literature” or “Comparative
Literature” emerged in the period between  and . Generally,
institutions that didn’t develop a program of “comparative literature” by 
ended up waiting until after the Second World War to do so. Departments of
comparative literature got their start in a range of different ways. Harvard was
one of the first schools to embrace the new discipline, and it did so explicitly
by hiring Arthur Richmond Marsh as an “Assistant Professor of Comparative
Literature” in .12 Harvard also immediately created a new rubric for
“comparative literature” in the catalog. The State University of Kentucky
does not seem to have gone looking for a comparatist, but they got one when
they hired Alastair Mackenzie in . By  he had changed the name of the
English department to “English and Comparative Literature.”13
At the University of Chicago, the department of General Literature has
a more complicated history, fueled in practice by a demand for literature
courses in translation. Biblical literature made this demand apparent in the
nineteenth century, since relatively few students knew Hebrew and Greek.
By , courses on the Bible in English were rolled into a department of
“Literature (in English)” that also taught other literatures in translation.
In , this became a department of “General Literature” that openly
embraced “literary theory” and “comparative literature” as central parts of its
mission.14
These varied paths are worth tracing because they illustrate a strategically
vague fusion of impulses that was central to the curricular success of the
comparative project. The encompassing anthropological theories produced
by writers like Posnett and Mackenzie may have defined the ultimate goals of
the field. But at most institutions, those synoptic theories played only a small
role in the curriculum. (At the University of Kentucky, Mackenzie taught
a required senior capstone course on the “Evolution of Literature,” based
on his book of the same name, but this is an exceptional case.)15 Instead,
course offerings were shaped by a demand for literature in translation, and
by the existing interests of faculty who worked on more than one linguistic
tradition.
In short, Posnett’s ambitiously global anthropological project began
to turn into a more familiar kind of “comp lit” as soon as it had to be
institutionalized in the curriculum. Courses were rarely organized around
broad social categories like “the clan” or “the city commonwealth.”
Instead they echoed the structure of existing courses on European national
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
123
literature—with the slight twist that a single course could now cover more
than one national tradition. Both at Chicago and at Harvard, for instance,
courses were regularly offered on romanticism as a European phenomenon.
Comparative literature failed to dislodge the period survey course, then,
in part for simple reasons of path dependency. The literary curriculum
was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the
curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from
departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure.
But the cost of doing that was a fundamental reorientation of its approach to
literary history.
So this is partly a story about institutional inertia. But inertia and path
dependency are not the whole story. For although the comparative project was
reshaped by its collision with curricular institutions, those institutions were
themselves capable of change—and by the s they were already beginning
to change to accommodate the comparative emphasis on continuity and
development. Many departments of national literature began to offer courses
on international themes—“English Influences Upon German Literature,”
for instance.16 More interestingly, course descriptions in many departments
began to promise to explain processes of development instead of merely
describing a period. At the University of Illinois in –, for instance,
courses included “The Transition from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth
Century,” “The Development of the Essay,” and “The Origin of the English
Novel.”17 At Radcliffe College in –, they included “The Development
of French Comedy in the Nineteenth Century” and “The Development of
French Lyric Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.”18 At Stanford in –, they
included “The Historical Spirit in English Literature: Its Growth from  to
the Present Day.”19
The widely-shared impulse to reframe courses around developmental
questions suggests that the project of comparative literature was just one
symptom of a broader will-to-theory among literary historians. In the later
nineteenth century, the academic study of literature had been dominated by
a conflict between literary critics (who were often genteel amateurs without
formal training) and philologists with doctoral degrees. As Michael Warner
has pointed out, the modern discipline of literary study was produced in large
part by sublating that dialectical opposition. Professors caught between genteel
and professionalized alternatives began to look for a version of literary study
that would promise both general cultivation and specialized methodology.20
124The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
This demand to fuse cultivation with theory would eventually be addressed
by the New Critical claim that reading was itself a specialized skill requiring
formal training. But in the first three decades of the twentieth century,
many scholars found it more intuitive to fuse cultural and methodological
sophistication by proposing a “scientific,” explanatory model of literary history.
One way to express this emphasis in the curriculum was to reorient courses
around transitions that could pose historical puzzles. “The Transition from the
Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century” is a chronologically delimited rubric,
and in that sense not absolutely different from “Augustan Literature.” But one
of these titles implies an object to be described; the other implies a process
of change to be explained. In the teens and twenties, course descriptions in
literature departments across America shifted subtly but palpably in the latter
direction. In this shift, periodization is not erased (there is still a “seventeenth
century” and an “eighteenth century.”) But it is slightly decentered.
Literary Culture and the Rejection of Continuity
The problem-centered course descriptions that literature professors began
to write in the nineteen-teens closely resembled a genre of course description
that already dominated departments of History, and that remains prominent
there. “History of Modern Colonization.” “The Development of the French
Monarchy, –.”21 History courses are still commonly framed around
explanatory puzzles, and especially around processes of development or
moments of transition. In literature departments, by contrast, the rhetoric
of transition and development didn’t last long. It had largely disappeared by
the s, and it hasn’t returned on a large scale since then. We may not have
abandoned historical explanation, but the rubrics in our course catalogs tend
to downplay that goal in favor of description. When they mention history,
they typically name a period like “English Romanticism” or a movement like
“the Harlem Renaissance.” What happened to course rubrics that promise to
explain processes of development?
The short answer is that they were swept away by a larger war—well
described in Gerald Graff ’s Professing Literature—between “scholars” and
“critics.”22 I have already suggested that the explanatory aspirations of earlytwentieth-century literary history should be understood as an attempt
to reconcile specialized learning with general literary culture. But many
observers felt that the literary-historical solution had in practice abandoned
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
125
cultural ideals. Instead of evaluating works or exercising literary sensibility,
historical scholars spent their energy discovering sources and tracing
influences. Even John Livingstone Lowes—author of The Road to Xanadu
(), itself a monument to source-study—worried that “our interests are
becoming special, minute, discrete.”23
Other observers were more sweeping in their condemnation of literary
history, and they tended to indict exactly the two aspects of the period’s
historicism I have highlighted in this chapter: scholars’ aspiration to explain
processes of development scientifically, and the notion that comparative
literature could unite those processes in a connected, continuous whole.
Norman Foerster’s book The American Scholar () offered a critique that
would be cited often in subsequent decades:
Literary history, in the strict view of it now prevailing, is an effort to ascertain
and describe the sequence of literary phenomena objectively, scientifically,
without the bias of criticism. Its ultimate purpose is to present the history of
literature as a whole, regardless of linguistic and national boundaries. Hence,
in theory, all the departments of literature in our universities coalesce in the
department of comparative literature. Subordinate to this final purpose is
the study of each national literature. . . . Subordinate in turn is the history of
movements and periods. . . . Thus, if literary history were ever completely and
finally written, we should be able to assign to every work a place of its own in
an unbroken sequence. . . . Owing to gaps in the record . . . this comprehensive
aim can never be fulfilled, but to it the literary historian addresses himself in
the hopeful spirit of the natural scientist.
For Foerster this is a mistakenly scientistic model of literary history. It
represents “literature as a developing organism,” and concerns itself merely
“with heredity, with environment, with evolution.” In tracing the relations
of part and whole, what get lost are questions of “worth or value . . . praise
or blame.” This prevents literary scholarship from fulfilling its social
responsibility—which, Foerster suggests, is to justify the pre-eminence of an
elite on general cultural grounds, rather than mere knowledge. “Soon we shall
have to reach a decision whether the Ph.D stamps a person as belonging to the
élite, or merely hallmarks him as a Robot of Learning.” The words belonged
to Otto Heller, Dean of Washington University, but Foerster borrowed them
as the first sentence of his “Preface,” and they fairly reflect his argument that
literature should be studied for “its civilizing properties,” and not merely as
an object of knowledge.24
126The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
What Foerster doesn’t offer is a fully-thought-out alternate model of
literary scholarship. He suggests that literary history, for instance, needs to
be reconnected to critical judgment. But since Foerster assumes that critical
judgment is founded on eternal standards (“excellences that are largely
timeless and aesthetic”), he is unable to explain how judgment and historical
specificity can be mutually supportive principles.25
For a more satisfactory solution to that problem, we should turn to René
Wellek. In explaining how literary history and critical judgment could fuse,
Wellek also decisively reaffirmed the centrality of periodization in literary
studies, even for projects like comparative literature that had previously resisted
it. Wellek will thus provide the single clearest answer to the question that has
guided this chapter from the beginning: Why didn’t comparative literature
successfully displace periodization in the first half of the twentieth century?
For Wellek’s ideas about periodization, the most obvious place to turn
is his famous debate with A. O. Lovejoy about the nature of romanticism.
Lovejoy was a philosopher rather than a literary scholar, but his essay on
romanticism was published in PMLA, and his version of “the history of
ideas” envisioned the historian’s task in a way that was quite compatible with
early-twentieth-century comparative literature. Lovejoy proposed to trace
processes of development by dissolving national traditions and competing
schools of thought into their constituent components—“unit ideas” that
might separate and recombine with each other over time. This conception
of history was analogous both to recently-popularized genetic models of
heredity, and to literary historians’ preoccupation with the transmission of
influences and motifs. In “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (),
Lovejoy puts the technique into practice by dissolving “Romanticism” into
a collection of “ideas and aesthetic susceptibilities.” In doing so, he finds
that the traits characterized as romantic have no essential connection with
each other, and are in fact frequently contradictory. Romanticism is said
to look back nostalgically to the past, but also to ignore the past in favor of
the future; it is said to worship physical nature, but also to look through the
physical world as through a veil. Lovejoy concludes that we should refer to
“romanticisms” in the plural, but he also, more importantly, concludes that no
cultural movement is a unified entity. What matter are the “simpler, diversely
combinable, intellectual and emotional components of such complexes,” and
it is the task of the historian to trace those components as they combine and
recombine.26
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
127
Wellek responded to Lovejoy by reaffirming the unity of European
romanticism, first in an essay of  and again at more length in .
But since Wellek’s first response came sixteen years after Lovejoy’s essay,
“respond” is perhaps the wrong verb. The so-called Lovejoy-Wellek debate
is not a controversy that can be dated to a particular moment. It is better
understood as dramatizing a contrast between two successive approaches to
literary history. Lovejoy’s attempt to explain cultural change in a detailed,
continuous way by breaking movements into their components had
harmonized with the goals of literary scholarship around . But by the
s, criticism was in the ascendant, and the place of history in literary study
was becoming increasingly uncertain. By challenging Lovejoy, Wellek made a
statement not just about romanticism but about the historical aspirations that
critics ought to retain, and those they ought to discard.
I agree with Robert Griffin that the key to Wellek’s argument is his
insistence on critical evaluation.27 Wellek acknowledges that many writers
now called “romantic” would not have embraced the slogan themselves,
and acknowledges that the romantic period included unromantic elements,
which vary from one nation to the next. He nevertheless defines romanticism
generally as a movement having “imagination for the view of poetry, nature
for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style.”28 Wellek is
able to say both of these things—extracting unity from apparent diversity—
because he understands periods as evaluative categories. A period is “a system
of norms,” and we know which norms were operative in a given period by
asking how successfully they guided practice. “[I]t is entirely possible to
envisage a situation in which older norms still prevailed numerically while
the new conventions were created or used by writers of greatest artistic
importance. It thus seems to me impossible to avoid the critical problem of
evaluation in literary history.”29
By , this insistence on evaluation was not controversial. For several
decades, writers like Foerster had been calling for a return to an evaluative,
critical history. So Wellek runs no risk by foregrounding evaluative
assumptions on the second page of his article. The fact that he presumed a role
for critical judgment would be, on the contrary, a strength of his argument for
many readers. In fact, one might even say that this is the real force of Wellek’s
intervention: less to prove, empirically, that literary periods exist, than to
show that periodization is a necessary assumption because it alone provides
an organizing context where evaluation and history can work together.
128The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
This would be a fairly bold reading if all we had to work with were Wellek’s
essays about romanticism. But in the s, as Wellek was developing his
response to Lovejoy, he was also developing a general theory of literary history.
His thoughts on the topic appeared first in Literary Scholarship, its Aims and
Methods (), edited by Norman Foerster; a more polished version of the
same argument was later included in the Theory of Literature () Wellek
wrote with Austin Warren. Both versions of this argument have attracted
some comment. Gerald Graff suggests that the  version of the essay
inaugurated an influential (and he contends, mistaken) distinction between
“extrinsic” and “intrinsic” literary history—between histories of literature
organized by philosophical concepts or social forces, and those organized
by properly literary categories. 30 Mark Parker has observed that the 
version of the argument poses a strange contradiction that keeps recurring
in subsequent discussions of periodization. Wellek seems to acknowledge
that the concept of a literary period is inherently unstable, at the same time
as he posits the concept as absolutely necessary for literary history.31 I think
these are both insightful observations; the point I want to make is that they’re
logically connected. It is true that there is something strangely imperative
about Wellek’s approach to periodization. But he insists on period concepts
(in spite of their acknowledged intellectual problems) because characterizing
periods turns out to be the only way to write an “intrinsic” literary history.
Wellek arrives at this conclusion because he’s candid about the difficulties
confronting a historian who wishes to stick to a purely literary subject. The 
version of his argument begins, in fact, by asking whether it is even “possible
to write literary history, that is, to write that which will be both literary and a
history.” Attempts to produce real narrative connection tend to become either
“social histories, or histories of thought illustrated in literature.” On the other
hand, histories that are resolutely literary in their approach tend to cease to
be historical, dissolving into “a discontinuous series of essays on individual
authors.”32
Although the text doesn’t frame the problem in these terms, Wellek
is grappling here with evidence for social materialism. Ideas do make a
difference in history, and literary forms make a difference as well. But when
historians strive to link events and explain changes, the overall shape of a
convincing account will usually turn out to be social rather than intellectual,
because history is at bottom a social process. However, this is definitely not
the conclusion Wellek himself reaches. Instead he suggests that “historical
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
129
and natural processes” require fundamentally different kinds of explanation.
Natural processes are governed by regular laws. But since it is impossible to
identify regular laws that govern history, historical processes will dissolve
into a meaningless sequence of events unless we relate “the historical process
to a value or norm.” On the other hand, “the individuality of the historical
event” requires us to acknowledge that there can be multiple norms at play in
history: “the historical process will produce ever new forms of value, hitherto
unknown and unpredictable.” In short, literary history can only be given
meaning if it is organized around a series of periods or epochs, each of which
represents a new and incommensurable system of values.33
These ideas are not new; in fact, much of the earlier portion of this book
has traced their genealogy. But Wellek is drawn to them for different reasons
than motivated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. I am afraid I
tend not to give much weight to his explicit philosophy of history; Wellek is a
thoughtful literary critic, but when he dips into philosophy, abstract premises
seem to be invented in an ad hoc way to support predetermined conclusions.
(Why, for instance, do historical processes have to be understood in relation
to systems of values?) But there are other moments where Wellek seems quite
candid about the motives governing this argument.
There is, one must admit, a logical circle here: the historical process has to be
judged by values, while the scale of values is itself derived from history. But
this seems unavoidable, for otherwise we must either resign ourselves to the
idea of a meaningless flux of change or apply some extra-literary standard—
some Absolute, extraneous to the process of literature.34
The clause after “otherwise” admits, in effect, that periodization is necessary
for disciplinary reasons. It is taken as a given that we cannot afford to
organize literary history around social categories “extraneous” to literature.
So we have to frame period concepts around scales of value that can be drawn
from literature itself. The task of the literary historian will be less to explain
change causally than to contrast those historically contingent scales of value.
But the important thing for my purposes is the unchallenged premise behind
this argument: the study of literature must have intellectual autonomy from
other disciplines.
I think that premise is very dubious, and should make us skeptical about
Wellek’s defense of periodization. But I also want to acknowledge that Wellek
was grappling with a real disciplinary problem. Because the course of history
130The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
is not often shaped by purely literary forces, literary historians will always find
it hard to write long, sweeping, explanatory narratives. Wellek is right that
tracing literary “influence” will never by itself suffice. If we aspire to produce
connected historical explanations, our works will usually tend to become less
literary. But if we restrict ourselves purely to literature, on the other hand, we
may fail to explain the phenomena we describe. The formal solution Wellek
proposes to this dilemma is valid: instead of aspiring to explain everything
causally, it often does make sense to contrast periods, case studies, or ideal
types.
But this doesn’t mean that literary historians have to make a firm and final
choice between intrinsic and extrinsic (non-literary) kinds of explanation. In
the present study, for instance, I try to explain the causal connections between
literary and social phenomena within the scope of each chapter, but I don’t
pretend to explain all the social changes that intervene between chapters—
between (say) London in  and the United States in . I bracket the
challenging task of causal explanation on that larger scale, because social
history would otherwise take over the narrative and divert the book from its
literary and intellectual subjects.
This is not a new solution, and it may not be a perfect one. My point is
simply that the choice between intrinsic and extrinsic factors never has to
be an all-or-nothing question. Wellek presents it as an all-or-nothing choice
because he tends to interpret it as a question of disciplinary autonomy. In
the  version of the argument he comments, for instance, that “topics like
‘Women as Healers in Mediaeval Life and Literature’ are being accepted by
the foremost American universities for the doctorate in English.” This may
seem harmless—a mere “terminological confusion,”
In practice, there is, however, a very real danger that this terminological
confusion of genres will be detrimental to the central aims of literary study.
The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will
crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous
criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be
judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring
discipline.35
The slippery-slope argument here wouldn’t be convincing if it were actually
an argument about the content of scholarship. Intellectually, it is obviously
possible to balance different subjects in an infinite variety of ways; there is
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
131
no logical reason to assume that the introduction of subject B will inevitably
evacuate A. The slippery-slope argument becomes convincing only because
it is framed here as an argument about collective (disciplinary) autonomy.
Where questions of collective honor are concerned, human beings do have a
tendency to assume that all compromise leads inevitably to capitulation. So
one must defend the border.
Arguments of this form have been very common in literary studies, from
the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. They should perhaps
puzzle us a bit more than they do. It is after all not true that compromises
between disciplines inevitably reduce one discipline or the other to a puppet
state. They often produce new hybrid disciplines. Literary scholars have been
very quick to assume that genuine literary study will be hollowed out whenever
we borrow another discipline’s methods. At least in the early twentieth
century, this anxiety seems to have been founded less on any immediate
material fear about the fate of English departments than on a broader tension
between the cultural and professional missions of higher education. Culture
has an anomalous place in the university: it always seems to be in danger
of being reduced to mere knowledge, and its professors to mere “Robots of
Learning.”
So when Wellek argues that literary history must either be organized
around discontinuous “scales of value,” or subjugated to some “extraneous”
standard, it seems fair to read his defense of periodization symptomatically.
At bottom he is arguing that literary periods are necessary for reasons
of disciplinary autonomy. Only division into periods (conceived as
incommensurable “systems of norms”) can preserve the properly cultural
character of literary study. Without periodization, literature will inevitably be
reduced to a province of some other discipline, and culture will be reduced to
mere historical explanation.
The Fate of Comparative Literature, and
Why We Fail to Remember It
Wellek’s argument about periodization was enormously influential. The
Theory of Literature that contained his account of the cultural necessity of
periodization became one of the most widely-reprinted works of literary
scholarship in the twentieth century. It was translated into at least thirteen
languages, and it is difficult to count the number of international editions
132The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
it went through; I stopped counting at thirty. Wellek’s debate with Lovejoy
also had substantial influence, at any rate in America: several critics agree
that recent debates about periodization have tended to rehearse the terms of
the Lovejoy-Wellek dispute.36 In the specific case of American comparative
literature, there can be no doubt of Wellek’s importance: he was central
to the postwar resurgence of the field, and helped to found Comparative
Literature, the first American journal in the subject. (Wellek’s critique of
Lovejoy was in fact featured in the first issue of Comparative Literature.) In
the s, Wellek used his eminence to stamp out remnants of the older, prewar version of the comparative project, devoted to influence and other forms
of continuity. His  essay on “The Crisis in Comparative Literature,” for
instance, condemns parts of the field that have “clung to ‘factual relations,’
sources and influences,” or for that matter to “causal explanation” at all.
Comparative Literature should abandon its special concern with causality,
and become instead a term “for any study of literature transcending the limits
of one national literature.”37 Since this is now the only meaning of the term we
remember, Wellek’s proposal was evidently well received.
On the other hand, I don’t want to exaggerate Wellek’s personal
significance. The most important evidence in this chapter is still negative
evidence: it’s the fact that the ambitious anthropological goals of comparative
literature in the period – never achieved more than a slight effect
on the literary curriculum. Here and there a course title was rephrased to
emphasize “development” or “transition.” But on the whole, the organizing
logic of the literary curriculum remained unchanged. The curriculum was
not reorganized to trace the transmission of motifs, or to explain the social
evolution of literature. It continued to describe movements and periods as
discontinuous cultural wholes. The critique of historical continuity launched
by writers like Foerster and Wellek was only a belated justification for
abandoning a project that had already failed to institutionalize itself on a
curricular level.
Moreover, even the intellectual critiques of that project seem to have been
guided by an underlying curricular rationale. The fundamental reason why
Foerster and Wellek rejected historical explanation as a mission for literary
scholarship, after all, was that it failed to advance the discipline’s educational,
cultural mission. So we may not have to choose between intellectual and
social explanations for the persistence of the period survey course: the social
basis of this struggle was fairly overt. Periodization persisted because it
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
133
allowed literary scholars to avoid reliance on other disciplines, and organize
themselves instead around contrasted systems of purely critical norms.
I wouldn’t try to generalize this observation much beyond .
Periodization may have persisted in the second half of the twentieth century
for different social reasons. Toward the end of the century, the principle
of periodization may even have begun to lose its grip on the curriculum,
for reasons to be considered in the next chapter. But in the first half of the
twentieth century, it seems plain that periodization endured, in spite of
intellectual challenges, because it seemed fundamentally bound up with the
cultural authority of literary study. Nominalistic approaches that dissolved
literary history into a flux of motifs, ideas, and social structures seemed to
undermine the discipline’s cultural raison d’être. So, in spite of the prestige
of similar models in biology, anthropology, and history, they were rejected by
professors of literature.
This historical account doesn’t necessarily produce any prescriptive
conclusion about the curriculum today. I have acknowledged that literary
periods are a solution to a real problem: it is difficult to explain literary change
over long stretches of time without being drawn away from literature and into
social history. Substituting discontinuous contrast for explanation is one way
to address that problem: it’s a solution that plays a justifiable role both in
scholarship and in the literary curriculum. We might also need alternative
solutions, but let us defer that question to the final chapter.
I will venture to say two things here about literary theory after . First,
once we recognize how much pre-war theoretical controversy pivoted on
questions about continuity and causal explanation, it should become clear
that many pronouncements on that topic after  have been rehearsing old
disputes. In particular, I would suggest that Michel Foucault’s distinction
between “genetic” and “genealogical” history became so popular in literary
study partly because it dovetailed rather well with prevailing New Critical
attitudes to history. Like the New Critics, Foucault took a firm stand against
“continuous history”—a stand that remained consistent whether he was calling
his method “archaeology” or “genealogy.” His rhetorical strategy also remained
consistent: he attacked the premise of continuity by reading it as a symptom of
scholars’ investment in the stability and permanence of subjectivity. In a 
article “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” Foucault remarks,
[I]f history could remain the chain of uninterrupted continuities . . . it would
be a privileged shelter for consciousness: what it takes away from the latter
134The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
by bringing to light material determinations, inert practices, unconscious
processes . . . it would restore in the form of a spontaneous synthesis; or
rather, it would allow it [consciousness] to pick up once again all the threads
that had escaped it, to reanimate all those dead activities, and to become once
again the sovereign subject in a new or restored light. Continuous history is
the correlate of consciousness . . .38
In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (), Foucault pushes this symptomatic
reading a step farther, arguing that continuous history attempts to establish
not only the stability of “the sovereign subject” but “the immortality of
the soul.” By contrast, Foucauldian genealogy is devoted to “the systematic
dissociation of our identity.”39
I have found Foucault’s theses about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
consistently enlightening, and don’t want to slight his work as a historian. But
I do think that his methodological premises became widely cited in literary
study partly because, in our discipline, they were far from iconoclastic.
Professors of literature had been arguing since the early nineteenth century
that historical cultivation should be produced, not by continuous narrative,
but by contrasting “periods” that embodied incommensurable social systems.
Even before literary study was institutionalized in universities, writers were
representing literary culture as a dissociation of identity that recognized
alienated pieces of the self in past social formations. This form of immortality
could be every bit as appealing as genetic continuity. So by the middle of the
twentieth century, the idea of discontinuity was not, in literary study, even
slightly subversive. In the s, Foucault’s critique of continuity would have
specifically echoed René Wellek’s recent and influential attack on the tracing
of sources and influences in pre-New-Critical historicism. Foucauldian
“genealogy” may have been controversial in history departments, but in
literary study it offered an eloquent, philosophical rationale for an approach
to history that was already dominant.
To broaden this point slightly: our failure to recognize the congruence
between Foucauldian and New Critical attacks on “continuity” is probably
a symptom of a broader blind spot in literary study, which is, simply, a
widespread amnesia about the whole history of the discipline before New
Criticism. I have already mentioned that many comparatists believe their field
was founded by European emigrés after World War II. But this oversight is
part of a broader problem: literary scholars generally aren’t aware that literary
theory existed before New Criticism, except for philology and a vaguely
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
135
characterized belletrism. For instance, A Companion to Comparative Literature
() includes a chapter by Kenneth Surin on the history of the discipline in
America. “Prior to the s,” he says, “the field saw very little in the way of
critical and cultural theory, for a couple of reasons. First, New Criticism was
the dominant approach in literary studies in the United States . . .”40 He then
tells a story where historicism has to be invented ab novo, after the s,
in a wasteland that had previously known only theories of the autotelic text.
In any subfield of literary studies this narrative would involve some striking
omissions, but the irony is really painful in the context of comparative
literature. “Comparative literature” was virtually synonymous with “literary
theory” when it first hit American universities around the year , and at
that time, “literary theory” meant an ambitious anthropological historicism.
I suspect there is a great deal more we don’t remember about the history of
literary studies in the early twentieth century. Paging through course catalogs
from the period, I am continually taken aback by experimental courses like
“The Magazine in America” () or “Motion Pictures: Their Appreciation
and their Relation to Literature” (). I’m afraid the history of a discipline gets
written by the victors, and the mid-century victory of New Criticism was very
complete—so complete, in fact, that it nearly erased the whole institutional
history preceding it. Until Gerald Graff wrote Professing Literature, many
late-twentieth-century histories of literary study were actually histories “of
literary criticism,” constructing an imaginary genealogy of the discipline that
ran from Matthew Arnold through the likes of T. S. Eliot, and largely ignoring
the institutional history of the university curriculum. It’s especially worth
addressing this oversight now, because there are growing signs that literary
study may be about to rehearse early-twentieth-century debates about the
threat of “scientism” and “factualism” in our discipline. I’ll have something
more to say about those topics in the final chapter.
5
Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status
Anxieties of Historicism in the 1990s
I
the institutional foundations of literary historicism enjoyed remarkable stability. In the academy, for
instance, periodization remained the primary organizing principle of literary
curricula and professional communication from  to the present. Fierce
wars were fought and refought over the proper way to teach period survey
courses: should professors emphasize New Criticism or psychoanalysis, New
Historicism or deconstruction? But all the while, the premise that period survey courses had to be taught, and that professors therefore had to be trained
as period specialists, remained largely unchallenged.
By the end of the century, however, an elegiac tone had begun to creep into
discussions of historicism, both in the academy and in literary culture more
broadly. Although the concrete institutional crisis affecting the humanities in
Britain and the United States today is more severe than it was in the s—
for obvious economic reasons—it may be useful to look back at that decade
in order to understand how the basic institutions of literary culture lost so
much of their authority. The loss of authority was already perceptible in the
s, and was expressed in critical nonfiction, in fiction, and in film as a
peculiar kind of anxiety about historical forgetfulness. In the end, I don’t
think the concept of postmodernism offers a satisfactory explanation of the
anxieties surrounding history in the s: the term expressed a will to selfperiodization that was a defensive symptom of the crisis at least as much as
an illuminating analysis of it. But since the word has been very influential, a
136
n t he t w en t i e t h c en t u r y,
Stories of Parallel Lives
137
discussion of historicism in the s probably has no choice but to begin as a
discussion of postmodernism.
The meaning of the term was of course itself a topic of contention. Was
postmodernism a discrete artistic movement, a structural transformation of
modernity as a whole, or merely a convenient synonym for “the period after
the Second World War”? Although advocates and critics of postmodernity
defined the term differently, they did concur on one point. The evocation of
bygone eras that characterized postmodern art, fiction, and film was not to
be taken at face value. Postmodern historical fiction, for instance, was not
a nostalgic recreation of nineteenth-century realism. It was rather (if you
believed Linda Hutcheon) a playful decentering of positivist epistemology,
allowing readers to recognize history itself as a constructed narrative.1 Or,
if you preferred Fredric Jameson’s grimmer interpretation, the historical
turn in contemporary culture was a symptom of history’s disappearance: the
consciousness of historical difference that might have supported nostalgia
had vanished, to be replaced by a pastiche of interchangeable retro styles.2
Stories of Parallel Lives
If the large philosophical claims made for and against postmodern
historical fiction began to seem dated toward the end of the s, it is not
because that mode of artistic production sputtered out, but because it was
subsumed in broader trends as it matured. The frame-breaking gestures and
stylistic quotation marks deployed by the “historiographical metafictions”
of John Fowles and E. L. Doctorow were once received as challenges to the
“transparency of historical referentiality.”3 The slightly later generation of
historical novels that metamorphosed into motion pictures in the s were
equally self-conscious. But their metafictional layering didn’t necessarily have
the effect of reminding the reader that history is a linguistic construct. Novels
like Possession and The Hours used metafiction not to distance the past, but to
transmute historical representation into something like personal memory.
They achieved this by relying on the premise of parallel lives, which
entwines historical difference with characters’ private yearnings for a lost
past. Actors, biographers, or critics set off on the trail of characters in an
earlier historical period, who turn out to be in some sense their prototypes;
an eerie isomorphy emerges between the contemporary and ancestral layers
of the story. Harold Pinter’s screenplay for the  film version of The French
138Stories of Parallel Lives
Lieutenant’s Woman was one of the earliest examples of the pattern. John
Fowles had endowed his  novel with an obtrusively modern narrator, but
the parallel between storylines in separate centuries was Pinter’s addition—
his way of translating narrative self-consciousness into the dramatic medium.
The premise of parallel lives was particularly fertile between  and .
A selective list of examples from that period might include Peter Ackroyd’s
Hawksmoor () and Chatterton (), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (),
Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel [La Tabla de Flandes] (), Tom
Stoppard’s play Arcadia (), and the film Dead Again (), written by
Scott Frank and directed by Kenneth Branagh. Film versions of Possession
and of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours () attracted a substantial
audience.
One does need to be cautious about periodizing this genre, but it’s not
necessary to go all the way back to Plutarch. In spite of their title, the Parallel
Lives produce an unrelated pleasure; Plutarch compares his noble Grecians
and Romans as if they could have been contemporaries, using congruences
to point out ethical universals. The genre under discussion, by contrast, takes
it for granted that actual repetition of the past is impossible; it attends to
apparent echoes only in order to foreground the transmission of historical
memory. A real continuity does exist, by contrast, between contemporary
parallel-lives stories and Gothic tradition. Mid-century psychological Gothics
like Du Maurier’s Rebecca () and Hitchcock’s Vertigo () implied that
contemporary characters were possessed by ancestral models who led them
to reenact the traumas of the past. Indeed, Gothic novels have been playing
changes on the notion that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons
ever since Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; it is a favorite Gothic way of
thinking about history. But ancestral possession carried very different class
implications in older works than it does in recent examples. This perhaps goes
without saying for a writer like Walpole. But even in mid-twentieth-century
psychological thrillers, the drama of ancestral possession differed from more
recent examples in being staged as a compulsion to re-enact an oppressive
masquerade. In Rebecca and Vertigo, the layer of the story hidden in the past
dramatizes a set of values that ought to be vanishing; its power to reach from
the grave and enthrall middle-class protagonists suggests the covert survival
of class distinction in a society that had ostensibly outgrown such things. The
protagonists struggle to throw off the enthrallment and content themselves
with a (presumably natural) middle-class identity. Not surprisingly, these
Stories of Parallel Lives
139
stories reached a broad middle-class audience; Rebecca, for instance, was an
important prototype for the large and profitable Gothic romance industry.4
When texts from the s and s explore the premise of parallel lives, the
resurgence of the past is not felt as a threat. The characters in the older layer
of the story are portrayed sympathetically; in fact, the plot shuttles between
two different epochs, and two sets of protagonists who receive roughly equal
attention. Although events in the contemporary story still eerily reproduce
the past, that connection ultimately deepens the living characters’ sensibilities
and lifts them out of a sordid environment. This is not to deny that their
personal safety may be menaced along the way; in Dead Again and The Flanders
Panel, for instance, the discovery of a forgotten crime threatens to turn into
a reenactment of it. But the danger is now overcome by closer identification
with the past, not by an effort to throw off its spell. The contemporary genre’s
insistence on this conclusion is measurable by the moral anomalies it is
willing to create in order to reach it. As the title of Dead Again might suggest,
the film ends happily when the past lives of its protagonists usurp and replace
the drab present-day identities that were initially introduced to the audience.
Aesthete-murderers who craft a parallel between past and present crimes are
the most interesting characters in Hawksmoor and The Flanders Panel; though
they initially take the form of detective stories, both novels end by moving
back into the villain’s consciousness and celebrating its mysterious persistence
across time.
The parallel-lives premise leaves fewer moral loose ends in works like
Stoppard’s Arcadia and Byatt’s Possession, which give up all attempt to make
the past menacing, and create tension instead by letting the double-layered
plot generate dramatic irony. The audience sees contemporary characters
misled by gaps in the written record, and wonders whether they will ever
discover the full truth about their predecessors. But all these versions of the
parallel-lives story differ from the psychological Gothic in refusing to take
the oppressive weight of history seriously. The real source of suspense lies in a
struggle to remember and recreate a past threatened by oblivion. That conflict
is most intelligibly described from a point of view located in the past, which is
in fact the point of view that usually gets the last word in these works: the real
conflict is the struggle of the dead to transmit their identities to the future.
In a sense this is a return to an older model of historical fiction. Writers of
historical novels have long been aware that readers’ fascination with the past
is partly composed of a desire to prove that collective memory is stronger than
140Stories of Parallel Lives
death. As far back as Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, historical novels have hinted
at their own resemblance to funerary ritual.5 In staging spiritual possession
and exhumation as redemptive events, works like Possession and Dead Again
are perhaps less like Hitchcock than like the spiritualist historical fictions of
George Sand and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which literalized collective memory
as physical immortality. But the parallel-lives stories that have sprung up over
the last two decades revive the historical novel’s traditional concern with
mortality in order to make it a vehicle for contemporary social anxieties—
especially anxiety about the declining prestige of culture relative to other
forms of social distinction.6
The cycle of death and resurrection in these works is also a quest for social
status. Although the connection is developed differently in each case, the
outlines of a pattern become clear. The protagonists in the earlier layer of the
double plot are always knowledge workers, and usually artists. They include,
in the works so far cited, a composer, a pianist, an architect, a novelist, two
painters, two mathematicians, and four poets. (I’ll have more to say about
those interloping mathematicians in a moment.) These characters soon
discover that their profession does not confer the expected prestige: because
intellectual achievements are trumped by poverty (Ackroyd’s Thomas
Chatteron) or gender prejudice (Byatt’s Christabel LaMotte and Stoppard’s
Thomasina Coverley), or because the market for culture has shifted under
their feet (Roman Strauss, in Dead Again, can get paid for film music but
not for the opera he wants to finish). Typically they console themselves with
fantasies of historical resurrection. La Motte compares herself to Milton’s
phoenix: “And though her body die, her fame survives / A secular bird, ages
of lives.”7 Chatterton has a dying vision of the painters and writers who will
revive his name in subsequent ages. “I will not wholly die,” he concludes. “I
will live for ever . . . .”8
So far this is a familiar romantic story: the neglected genius acquires
immortal life as an influence on cultural history. But the contemporary layers
of parallel-lives plots frustrate the expected resurrection, and draw out the
underlying conflict, which now reveals itself more explicitly as a threat to
the prestige of culture. To begin with, the contemporary protagonists tend
to be critics, biographers, or artists who restore old paintings, instead of
primary producers of culture. They feel like epigones, and that fact already
suggests some interruption of their predecessors’ legacy. Moreover, they
are overshadowed within their own epigonal fields by competitors more at
Stories of Parallel Lives
141
ease with the mass media. The schemes of these competitors often interfere
with the immortality sought by the protagonists in the earlier layer of the
story: in Possession, for instance, the critic Mortimer Cropper steals texts and
memorabilia for his own collection, justifying it with a little sermon about
electronic reproduction and “the museum of the future.” In Arcadia, Bernard
Nightingale’s quest to be quoted in articles with headlines like “Bonking Byron
Shot Poet” muddies the historical waters, and obscures the contributions of
less famous nineteenth-century figures who have become more interesting
to the audience.9 In some cases, the threat to the immortality of the past
also develops fatal consequences in the present. Charles Wychwood, the
unpublished twentieth-century poet who is the protagonist of Chatterton,
suffers from a brain disease that is at least partly professional anxiety. A friend
sums up the threat in these terms: “There is no history any more. There is no
memory. There are no standards to encourage permanence—only novelty,
and the whole endless cycle of new objects. And books are simply objects—
consumer items picked up and laid aside.”10 After struggling to refute this
claim, Charles loses consciousness and collapses.
The lament is familiar: it sounds a bit like Sven Birkerts worrying about
the future of reading and “deep time” in The Gutenberg Elegies (), and a bit
like Fredric Jameson worrying about the fate of history in Postmodernism; or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (). And in fact historical fiction does
help illuminate recent cultural theory. It is hardly a closely-guarded secret that
theorists have lately been anxious about the material and social status of the
cultural professions.11 The parallel-lives genre suggests that the same anxiety
may also inform the elegy for memory (or “historicity” or “deep time”) that
has lately flourished in various guises in different academic disciplines. By
staging the declining value of culture as a threat to earthly immortality, stories
of parallel lives remind us that modern conceptions of culture have conferred
prestige above all by identifying the cultured individual with processes of
historical change. These stories also demonstrate how, as a consequence of
that identification, threats to the prestige of culture can be felt as threats to
history itself. I propose that recent elegies for historical memory reflect the
disappearance, not of history or memory (which so far seem to have survived
the s), but of something smaller that was nevertheless of great value to
college-educated professionals, and especially to cultural intellectuals. What
we have lost is our ability to believe in cultural history as a form of collective
immortality.
142Stories of Parallel Lives
This may help explain why so many contemporary stories of parallel
lives, in attempting to shore up that belief, return in particular to the period
between  and . The belief in historical immortality that seems now to
be waning developed in that period. By subordinating universal standards to
the idea of historical change, romantic historicism hollowed out older ideas
of fame. “No human monument,” Herder observed, “can endure intact and
eternal, for it was formed in the stream of generations only by the hands of
a certain time for that time.”12 This is more than an empirical observation
that reputations fade and monuments crumble; the point is rather that no
monument or ideal can hope to be as fundamental, as absolute, as change
itself. But in sealing the fate of Ozymandias, historicism also opened up new
forms of immortality. One could wager the future not on immutability, but
on flux. If writers and thinkers were agents through which history worked
its changes, they could imagine themselves as unacknowledged legislators
of the world. They would acquire immortality not primarily through fame,
but by becoming part of the ceaseless transformation that is history. The
more perfectly they crystallized the spirit of their own passing age, the more
directly they served history’s eternal logic.
Culture was not just one among many forms of social prestige; through
historicism, it claimed to encompass and transcend them all. Recall the
mathematicians who interposed themselves in that list of composers, painters,
and poets. Recent stories of parallel lives are not necessarily about “culture” in
the narrow sense of the fine arts. But neither are they about “cultural capital”
in the broad sense Pierre Bourdieu assigns that phrase, which expands
to include all forms of symbolic authority and educational attainment.13
Accountants (no matter how highly credentialed) do not become protagonists
of parallel-lives narratives; but mathematicians can (in Stoppard’s Arcadia)
because they are understood to make discoveries and thereby embody history.
We see in this genre the persistence of a particular kind of cultural distinction
that amounts to identification with history as a horizon of difference and
change.
Here I part company from thinkers who have argued that culture derives
its cachet from nationalism or from attempts to regulate a national vernacular.
Bill Readings, for instance, saw transnational corporations as the main
force dissolving the ideal of culture in the late twentieth century; reasoning
backwards from that observation, he concluded that the nineteenth-century
ideal of culture created prestige by identifying the individual with an organic
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143
national tradition now under attack by transnational forces.14 What this
argument doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge is the close affinity between the
nineteenth-century ideal of culture and the cosmopolitan classicism that
immediately preceded it. Although classicism was widely appropriated for
nationalist purposes (as in the French Revolution), even then the prestige
it conferred was rooted in its claim to transcend national identity. The
nineteenth-century ideal of culture retains a similar aspiration, although
instead of embodying universality in an ostensibly permanent classical ideal,
it defines it as consciousness of historical difference. The cultured individual
becomes a temporal cosmopolitan, not by grasping the eternal, but by
appreciating the singular and ephemeral. “To him,” as Walter Pater put it, “all
periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have
been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question
he asks is always:—In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the
period find itself?”15
Culture thus promised immortality to its consumers as well as its
producers. The cultured reader’s claim to have been “wrought upon by . . . all
modes of thought and life” parallelled the writer’s claim to embody the spirit
of his or her age.16 Both were ways of identifying with the eternity of history
itself, which was grasped, not as an overarching teleology or a principle of
eternal recurrence, but in the ephemeral singularities that distinguished an
infinite series of different historical forms receding into the past. As Carolyn
Williams remarks in a study of Pater’s “aesthetic historicism,” these disparate
historical moments are unified only through the critic’s retrospective gaze,
and only because that gaze is treated as analogous to personal memory. “This
structural analogy between personal memory and historical retrospection
. . . places the aesthetic critic beyond historical time, even as he bends his
attention to the absolute particularity of things in time.”17
The distinction at stake in stories of parallel lives is strongly linked
to historicism. One of the notable features of this genre is its interest in
the history of science—paleontology in The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
mathematics and thermodynamics in Arcadia, paleontology and marine
biology in Possession. This is a way of asserting intellectual breadth, to be
sure. But it is also a way of narrowing the definition of culture, by making
clear that what counts as culture is not a generalized aesthetic sensibility, but
consciousness of historical difference (whether in the arts or in the sciences).
The threat to culture, moreover, is expressed in these stories as a threat to
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the belief that participation in history makes one immortal. The sciences of
change—paleontology and thermodynamics—become in this connection
double-edged. As regions where discoveries can be made, they evoke a
possibility of immortality. But the discoveries themselves suggest a danger of
obsolescence or extinction.
Though The French Lieutenant’s Woman is not itself a story of parallel
lives, the interplay between its protagonist and its knowingly modern narrator
serves many of the same purposes. Charles Smithson, Fowles’s protagonist,
feels himself a “poor living fossil”: “the enormous apparatus rank required
a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive armor that had
been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian species.”18 At this point,
the narrator intervenes to make clear that fossilization threatens not only
the nineteenth-century aristocracy, but any class that defines itself by values
other than wealth—including both “the tender humanists who begin to
discern their own redundancy,” and the scientists who invented the computer
that is making those humanists redundant. The real threat is not technology,
but the “pursuit of money,” which fuels evolutionary change. “The scientist
is but one more form; and will be superseded.” In spite of the bleakness of
Fowles’s language, the analogy to evolution is ultimately consoling. It suggests
that “[W]hat dies is the form. Matter is immortal. There runs through this
succession of superseded forms we call existence a certain kind of afterlife.”19
Historical consciousness is thus in the end confirmed as the one principle that
resists and transcends the leveling power of commerce.
The rhetoric of evolutionary succession in The French Lieutenant’s Woman
gives its protagonist a plausibly nineteenth-century vocabulary for worrying a
twentieth-century question: Can knowledge workers still locate themselves in
the main line of cultural “evolution”—or are they now dead ends, throwbacks,
living fossils? In Arcadia, the analogy between this problem and the quest for
personal immortality is made explicit. Bernard Nightingale is a literary critic
who has published a flashy but dubious claim about Byron.
Hannah: If Bernard can stay ahead of getting the rug pulled till he’s dead,
he’ll be a success.
Valentine: Just like science . . . The ultimate fear is of posterity . . .
Hannah: Personally I don’t think it’ll take that long.
Valentine: . . . and then there’s the afterlife. An afterlife would be a mixed
blessing. “Ah—Bernard Nightingale, I don’t believe you know Lord Byron.” It
must be heaven up there.20
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145
The exchange is more than a joke about a researcher’s fear of being proved
wrong in heaven. The uneasiness it evokes is central to the comedy of Bernard’s
character: a scholar who fails to believe in the permanence of his subject, he
instead chases the transitory fame of talk shows and tabloid headlines, frankly
out to grab whatever he can before death. If Bernard believed in the dialectic—
vaster than empires and more slow—that is supposed to underwrite the
prestige of his class, he might conceivably look forward to being corrected
as an immortalizing sublation. But he lacks faith in that sort of afterlife, and
instead frantically converts history to celebrity, as it if were a currency losing
value. Although Bernard is a comic butt, the declining value of that currency
is a threat the play takes seriously.
The premise of parallel lives permits writers to acknowledge, but
symbolically resolve, that threat. On the literal level of the plot, traces
of cultural history that seemed to be permanently obscured by social or
economic prejudice are recovered and recorded. This already suggests a
promotion of cultural, over social and economic, sources of distinction. The
structure of the double-layered plot also explicitly compares the permanence
of culture to personal immortality: people who died long ago possess their
cultural descendants and live again through them, proving that history is still
a process by which the future transforms and partially resurrects the past.
Characters who champion the mass media and/or electronic reproduction
may delay and complicate this process of rebirth, but they pose the threat
only so that it can be overcome.
In Possession, for instance, two contemporary researchers reconstruct
(and reproduce in their own persons) the personal and literary relationship
between Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, nineteenth-century
poets. Their efforts are threatened when Mortimer Cropper, an advocate
of electronic reproduction, secretly opens a grave and appropriates a box
containing a letter from LaMotte that was never delivered or read. In an ironic
reversal of his ostensible commitment to electronic publicity, Cropper plans
to keep the letter as a private possession. But the contemporary researchers
are able to interrupt the grave robbery and turn it into a resurrection: the
letter is opened, part of LaMotte’s identity that seemed irretrievably lost is
recovered—and assimilated, as it happens, by a researcher who turns out to
be her biological descendant.
In short, the parallel-lives genre reassures readers who fear that their
investment in culture is losing value, by staging a plot in which the contemporary
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threat (diminished social status) is overcome by the original source of status
(identification with the permanence of cultural history). But the genre’s
literalization of cultural immortality as exhumation and resurrection is by
no means naïve; it reveals a frank understanding of the fantastic aspect of the
original desire. For this reason, the most thoughtful examples of the genre often
end by returning to the past, to take a lingering look at some detail that failed to
be preserved and reproduced.21 The postscript to Possession, for instance, reveals
that a second message, from Ash to LaMotte, went astray in a way that will hide
it forever from the intended recipient and from historians. In the final scene of
Arcadia, nineteenth-century characters spill over unobserved into preparations
for a twentieth-century costume party; the play ends with two couples waltzing
in Regency dress, on the same stage in different centuries. The image itself
proposes that history is immortality: historical consciousness (in the form of
costume drama) seems to guarantee the eternal recurrence of each moment of
experience. But the waltz equally dramatizes an emotional connection between
the two nineteenth-century characters, which the audience knows will be
destroyed when one of them dies in a fire to take place after the curtains close.
The twentieth-century characters who are waltzing never learn the full truth
about that nineteenth-century relationship, and are not themselves lovers. The
visuals, in short, evoke a longing to believe that cultural history immortalizes
experience, while the facts of the plot deny it.
Immortality and Memory in Cultural Theory
It is perhaps not surprising to find that the anxieties about cultural
prestige dramatized in s historical fiction also colored the era’s cultural
theory. What is slightly surprising is that theorists were just as willing as
novelists and screenwriters to represent the problem fantastically, as a
threat to immortality. David Simpson has remarked that the desire “to
speak with the dead”—in Stephen Greenblatt’s now-famous phrase—is a
central animating principle in contemporary criticism, and especially in the
celebration of local knowledge he defines as “the academic postmodern.”
“What are the autobiographies, the anecdotes, the conversations, the
photographs (in even the most skeptical biographies), and the local
knowledges . . . if not variations on the effort at giving life to what is
otherwise threateningly (if also safely) dead?” For Simpson this is evidence
both of academics’ professional investment in the interminability of
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147
historical interpretation, and of their longing for a worldly efficacy that
interminable discussion seems forever to defer. The novels and works of
criticism that revive the dead address both needs at once by proving that
after all “literature is life, and life is literature.”22 While I entirely concur with
Simpson’s thesis, I think it is possible to enlarge it. For although the desire to
speak with the dead subsumes within it a number of specifically professional
imperatives, it is at the most general level nothing less than a reaffirmation
of cultural immortality. And it can be found not only in the disciplines of
history, anthropology, and literary studies, but in films like Dead Again,
and in works of popular criticism, like Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies
(), that address an educated but not necessarily academic audience.
Birkerts argues that the transition from print to electronic culture entails
drastic phenomenological changes, of which the most uncanny is a flattening
of time itself. One function of print culture was to “keep alive the dangerous
and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a
destiny.” Reading thereby made it possible to move from “the idea of time
as simple succession” to the experience of “deep time.”23 That last phrase is
borrowed from John McPhee, who used it to suggest that the time latent in
rocks is so remote from the scale of human life that it immobilizes mortality:
“you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a
way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”24 Birkerts’s
account of reading implies that the cultural time latent on the printed page
performs a similar transformation.
When I am at the finest pitch of reading, I feel as if the whole of my life—past
as well as unknown future—were somehow available to me. Not in terms of
any high-definition particulars (reading is not clairvoyance) but as an object
of contemplation. At the same time, I register a definite awareness that I am,
in the present, part of a more extensive circuit, a circuit channeling what
Wallace Stevens called “the substance in us that prevails.”25
The passage begins by proposing that reading allows the reader to step out of
the flow of time to contemplate her own life as a timeless object. This is a kind
of personal immortality, and indeed the next page goes on to say that reading
makes one’s “soul” present to oneself. But reading also gives one access to
a circuit that seems to be “more extensive” both because it is collective and
because it extends backwards and forwards in time. That circuit “channels”
(in a sense somewhere between spiritualism and radio) a tacitly communal
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“substance in us that prevails.” Birkerts’s discussion of “deep time” thus turns
out to involve an equation between culture and collective immortality like the
one implicit in parallel-lives stories. And, like the authors of those stories, he
suggests that electronic communications threaten to interrupt immortality
(though he also appropriates the electronic “circuit,” interestingly enough, as
a metaphor for historicist culture).
Anxiety about immortality is as widespread on the cultural left as it is
in costume dramas or in Birkerts’s culturally conservative elegy for reading.
When academics on the left reaffirm cultural immortality, they tend to do so
by idealizing scholarship’s power to rescue otherwise forgotten and silenced
voices—an idealization particularly noticeable in the growing subfield of
historical studies devoted to the reconstruction of “memory.” The concept
of collective memory is not new, but recent academic discussions of the topic
seem to form a distinct project dating from the s, indebted in particular to
Pierre Nora’s seven-volume collection Les lieux de mémoire (–).26 In his
influential introduction to that collection, Nora argues that the proliferation
of recording technologies and historical archives has marginalized “memory,”
which now survives only “in gestures and habits, unspoken craft traditions,
intimate physical knowledge, ingrained reminiscences, and spontaneous
reflexes.”27 This argument, which identifies tradition with the body and with
subjectivity, might appear to have conservative implications. But as Kerwin
Klein has pointed out, it has received a surprisingly positive reception from
historians interested in ethnic and postcolonial identity, who have interpreted
Nora’s concept of “memory” as “a form of counterhistory that challenges the
false generalizations in exclusionary ‘History.’”28
This strange alliance becomes easier to comprehend if one interprets
recent academic interest in collective memory as a reaffirmation of the social
status conveyed by historicist culture. The ostensible opposition between
history and memory collapses in practice, because (as Nora stresses) memory
no longer exists as living tradition, but only in lieux de mémoire—“sites”
of memory fragmented and fossilized by history, ranging from Proust’s
madeleine to the defunct revolutionary calendar. The boundary between
memory and history is thus illusory; it functions mainly as a rhetorical
strategy for repackaging history. The boundary that Nora actually cares
about falls between a conception of history as the electronic transcription of
events (“the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the image”), and a
different aesthetic centered on lieux de mémoire—fossils which both represent
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149
and partly redress the obsolescence of memory, by revealing the past’s double
existence as corpse and as eternity.
Lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains: the ultimate embodiments
of memorial consciousness in a history that calls out for memory because
it has abandoned it. What brings the notion forth is the deritualization of
our world—which produces, manifests, establishes, constructs, decrees, and
maintains by artifice and by will a society fundamentally absorbed in its
own transformation and renewal, by its very nature valuing the new over the
ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past. Museums, archives,
cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments,
sanctuaries, fraternal orders—these are mounds marking the edge of another
age, illusions of eternity.29
This is a dirge for historicist culture. It expresses not anxiety about the loss of a
particular (simpler or more gracious) way of life, but about a marginalization
of “eternity” as such by the people who produce, establish, construct, decree,
and maintain the present. It also evokes an inherent opposition between
eternity and capitalism (emblematized particularly by electronic media).
Compare, for instance, Andreas Huyssen’s claim that “capitalist culture with
its continuing frenetic pace, its television politics of quick oblivion, and its
dissolution of public space in ever more channels of instant entertainment is
inherently amnesiac.”30
Nora’s response to this threat closely resembles the way recent stories of
parallel lives respond to the devaluation of historicist culture: he seeks out
fragments of the past that were never fully incorporated into their own age, and
which therefore have the potential to wake to a second existence in the present.
The fragmentary quality of these lieux de mémoire represents the contemporary
crisis of memory, while their rebirth in the present symbolically resolves it. As
a paradigmatic example, Nora offers the revolutionary calendar: an attempted
intervention in collective memory that qualifies as a lieu de mémoire because
it failed to endure as a living tradition, and so could return for a second life
in scattered allusions to Thermidor or Brumaire—half memory, half object
of historical study. More than anything else, “this dual identity” defines lieux
de mémoire: “moments of history are plucked out of the flow of history, then
returned to it; no longer quite alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells left on
the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.” Announcing that these
fossils form “an unconscious organization of collective memory that it is up
to us to bring to consciousness,” Nora defines a program for historians that
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closely resembles the imperative to exhume unopened letters and consummate
unconsummated relationships that drives the detective protagonists of recent
historical fiction.31 Neither group is really concerned with living memory: they
go in search of what was stillborn, and give it belated life, in order to experience
history’s partial triumph over its own obsolescence.
The politics of Nora’s project are open to debate; though it has been
welcomed by the postcolonial left, it is “in its French context,” as Klein
notes, “more nearly a conservative plaint about the fragmentation of French
identity.”32 Walter Benn Michaels and Ian Baucom have staged a similar debate
about the politics of an equivalent American discourse, which uses metaphors
of spiritualism and recovered memory to grapple with the historical trauma
of slavery. For Baucom, this approach gives voice to a “counter-Enlightenment
philosophy of history,” whereas for Michaels it expresses a nostalgic attempt to
consolidate a stable cultural identity.33 For a less politically equivocal example
of the discourse of historical memory, one might turn to Fredric Jameson,
whose central theses about postmodernity can be understood as materialist
formulations of the anxiety other writers have expressed in terms of memory
or deep time. Jameson defines the problem as a “crisis in historicity”—that
is, a crisis in our ability to perceive “the present as history.” The very facility
of stylistic periodization in postmodernity makes it difficult for works of art
to defamiliarize the present or to represent its relation to the past. According
to Jameson, postmodernity “has forgotten how to think historically” because
capital has finally succeeded in commodifying time itself, congealing
historical difference into retro style.34
Although Jameson formulates the crisis in insistently material terms, he
too represents it as a threat to immortality. Postmodern amnesia is a problem
because history is necessary “for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous
and silenced generations.” Since it is “the retrospective dimension necessary
for any vital reorientation of our collective future,” this ritual remembrance
of the dead also guarantees the future vitality of the community—always an
important function of funerary rituals.35 Of course, Jameson is talking about
politics. But for Jameson, the point of political interpretation is really to do
what funerary ritual does in religion: to reaffirm the continuity of collective
existence. This theme was already central to The Political Unconscious ():
Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the
cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned
to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-
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151
forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. . . . These matters can
recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of
a single great collective story . . . only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a
single vast unfinished plot . . . .36
A revenant who represents historical difference as wisdom from beyond
the grave, Tiresias is in this passage a bit like Pater’s La Gioconda—though
admittedly, a Marxist critic’s identification with historical time is not
interchangeable with an aesthete’s. Jameson is on his guard, as a matter of
course, against any reification of history as “culture” one could acquire. But
this does not mean that he scorns cultural immortality: it means only that
he understands what it is. Since Jameson frankly acknowledges a desire to
overcome death by identifying with “a single great collective story,” he doesn’t
need to disguise that desire as a celebration of reading, or of somatic memory.
But he has as much reason as Birkerts or Nora to be troubled by a decline in
“the mystery of the cultural past,” because Marxist literary interpretation still
needs to show that superseded social forms speak to the present, not in spite
of but (herein lies the mystery) because of their contingent specificity.
How Postmodernism Misrecognized Itself as
a Threat to “Historical Continuity”
In short, the elegies for historicism that appeared in the s expressed
an oddly consistent concern with immortality. Writers of popular nonfiction,
like Sven Birkerts, worried that electronic media were destroying a timeless
connection that reading had once created between the present and the past.
Fiction, drama, and film staged a similar threat, and used the premise of
parallel lives to address it through symbolic resurrection. In academia, the
discourse of historical “memory” represented the historian’s task in terms that
were strikingly similar to the plot of a parallel-lives narrative: when memory
itself is under siege, it is no longer enough to reconstruct the past—one has
to tease out its living traces in the present. Fredric Jameson articulated the
problem in a similar if more melancholy way, lamenting that the flattening of
history into pop-cultural images and simulacra prevented “the resurrection
of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations.”37
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, these anxieties may
sound dated, and I agree that the threat to “history” that writers described in
the s never did exist in the general, sweeping form they postulated. The
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flowering of the parallel-lives genre has special relevance here, for although its
protagonists often share Jameson’s anxieties, the genre itself tends to refute
his thesis of a postmodern crisis in historicity. After all, Jameson’s evidence
for that crisis included the observation that the historical novel and the
costume film have “fallen into disrepute and infrequency”; an observation
that went to print just as both forms were entering a prolonged boom in sales
and prestige.38 Moreover, the historical novels of the late s and s actually
promoted a rather materialistic vision of history. Sally Shuttleworth has
pointed out that “the retro-Victorian novel” is extremely careful “to offer a
broad materialist picture of Victorian culture” rather than a mere “drama
of ideas.”39 One could add that historical novels relying on the parallel-lives
premise excel specifically at representing “a past history which was once itself
a present”—a nineteenth-century achievement that Jameson represented as
lost to his own age. Of the charges one might level against fiction written in
the last two decades, the claim that it “has forgotten how to think historically”
seems to me one of the least plausible.
Why then did writers in the s believe that they were experiencing
a crisis of “historicity”? Here I think stories of parallel lives, with their
emphasis on metaphors of resurrection, provide a vivid clue. What was felt to
be threatened was not the possibility of thinking historically, so much as the
prestige attached to historical cultivation—prestige that had been represented
since the nineteenth century as participation in collective immortality.
Historical cultivation was supposed to bracket parochial present-day celebrity,
and give readers imaginative access to a wider range of standards—immortal
not in the sense that they were unchanging, but in the sense that their endless
multiplicity became itself a kind of permanence. Stories of parallel lives
tend to begin in a world where this promise has already failed: present-day
celebrity is triumphant, and the cultural past has lost its power to immortalize
anything. The function of the mysterious “parallel” between past and present
is to restore that immortality, and as I’ve noted above, the same metaphor of
resurrection was echoed more subtly in cultural criticism.
In a second way as well, I think stories of parallel lives offer a clearer guide
to the cultural crises of the s than the period’s critical prose did: they clearly
acknowledge that historical memory was threatened not by a loss of continuity
but, paradoxically, by a loss of discontinuity. The attraction of the genre
fundamentally depends on the premise that the two layers of the narrative are
separated by a culturally significant lapse of time. Without that lapse of time,
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153
all the magic of the parallel would be lost, and the story would collapse into
a routine drama of imperiled inheritance. While it is true that the conflict in
these stories often hinges on the transmission of some message or legacy from
past to present, the transmission becomes interesting precisely because it isn’t
continuous, but involves the apparent resurrection of something long dead.
This structural feature of the genre faithfully captures the historicist logic
that had governed culture since the nineteenth century. Culture has a prestige
that differs from the authority of mere custom in part because it is supposed
to transcend continuity. If critics still write occasionally about cultural
“tradition,” it is understood that this tradition is of a special sort which, as
T. S. Eliot famously explained, has nothing to do with “following the ways of
the immediate generation before us,” but rather “with a feeling that the whole
of the literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order.”40 This gives the cultured reader freedom
from immediate precedent at the same time as it connects him or her to an
imaginatively larger (if more diffuse) kind of authority—a connection that
is elegantly dramatized by the mysterious link to an arbitarily remote past
that lifts the protagonists of parallel-lives narrative out of their quotidian
surroundings.
Cultural criticism has had a blind spot on this topic for the last thirty years,
persistently misrecognizing challenges to historical cultivation as challenges
to an ideal of historical “continuity.” Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the
failure of all “master narratives” was echoed ten years later by David Harvey’s
claim that “postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity and
memory.”41 While Jameson expressed skepticism about Lyotard’s phrase
“master narrative,” he too tended to characterize postmodernism as a crisis
of historical connectivity—one that produced “heaps of fragments,” and
undermined “the notion of progress and telos.”42
This seems to me a case where cultural critics got the spirit of their own
age exactly wrong. While critics were defining a new period characterized
by the disappearance of all coherence, continuity, and progress, popular
assumptions about history were converging on a master narrative with a
Whiggish coherence unmatched since the eighteenth century—a narrative
that not only reaffirmed “progress and telos,” but affirmed that the telos of
history had in fact been achieved. The best-known statement of this premise
was Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that “at the end of the twentieth century,
it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History
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of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal
democracy.”43 Of course, Fukuyama’s timely thesis about the “end of history”
gave expression to a mood of liberal triumphalism that had been gestating for
several decades before the end of the Cold War. But I would suggest that it also
gave expression to a broader, less specifically political suspicion that all forms
of historical change had for some time been slowing down. In , the same
year Fukuyama published his original article on “The End of History” in The
National Interest, John Horgan “began to think seriously about the possibility
that science, pure science, might be over,” because it had achieved its goal or
begun to encounter fundsmental limits to human knowledge—an argument
he published in  as The End of Science.44 Meanwhile, a wide range of
observers noted that science fiction seemed to have lost its aspirational energy,
to be replaced by campy nostalgia for an imagined future of jet-packs and
moon bases that had somehow failed to materialize. Words like “technostalgia”
and “retrofuturism” are characteristic coinages of the s.
In one sense, the popular perception that history had slowed down (or
even come to an end) might seem to justify cultural critics’ claim that the late
twentieth century had abandoned “master narratives” and lost “all sense of
historical continuity.” It is true that the era had ceased to expect the sort of
continuity that might interest a Hegelian, involving the ceaseless unfolding of
a single dialectic. But this doesn’t mean that late twentieth-century observers
had ceased to believe in progress; they had merely come to suspect that it lay
for the most part in the past. And if “continuity” means a belief that the whole
of history can be explained by a single overarching logic, then arguments like
Fukuyama’s assert it in the strongest possible terms. Fukuyama proposes to
explain all of human history in terms of two universal principles: the advance
of natural science (which he sees as producing capitalism) and a “struggle
for recognition” (which he sees as producing democracy). The particulars of
his account would be difficult to defend (to put it mildly), but what I want
to highlight here is a broadly shared assumption that the achievements
of the present provide a valid interpretive key to history as a whole. For
Fukuyama the relevant achievement might be capitalism; for more recent
popular-historical writers it might be the decentered and networked mode of
communication embodied by the Internet. But the shared assumption, which
dominates popular historical consciousness now to a degree unprecedented
since the eighteenth century, is that the apparent differences between the
present and earlier eras will collapse, on examination, into continuity.
Stories of Parallel Lives
155
People who have spent their careers teaching history, or literary history,
will object that this is merely the fallacy of presentism, about which there is
nothing new. I agree that it is a kind of presentism; but that word imports
evaluative assumptions that flatten out some important nuances. Arguments
about the end of history are presentist in a newly unabashed way: they
acknowledge that presentism was in the past a fallacy, while suggesting that
it may cease to be a fallacy as we approach the end of history, since the stable
universals underlying historical change have begun to be revealed. One doesn’t
find many academics who are willing to make this argument as candidly
as Fukuyama did, but it is an almost inevitable corollary of the popular
impression that the pace of historical change has slowed, and its influence can
be felt in many ways: from waning interest in futurist speculation to waning
interest in cultural history.
I have found it a useful thought experiment to ask myself whether I can
imagine a contemporary British writer assuming, as casually as P. B. Shelley
did, that “when St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and
nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, . . . some transatlantic
commentator will be weighing” the merits of his work “in the scales of some
new and now unimagined system of criticism.”45 The key phrase here is
“new and now unimagined.” We can envision a wide range of apocalypses
at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some of which do threaten to
turn London into a marsh, if it is not first overrun by the living dead. But
all of these scenarios involve either the outright destruction of civilization,
or a regression to a simpler and more violent past. The notion that cultural
transformation will inevitably produce a new perspective “now unimagined”
seems to me one that romantic writers embraced both more seriously and
more easily than we are likely to do today. For a example that puts this premise
to the test, one might consider the recent editorial by Kwame Anthony Appiah
that asked “What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?” The question
might seem to invite the classic historicist reflection that each generation is
necessarily blind to the “now unimagined” perspectives located in its future.
But the surprising premise of Appiah’s piece was that we probably do, after
all, know which practices future generations will condemn, since a survey of
the past reveals several recurring clues characterizing such practices—above
all that “people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The
case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for
instance; it had been around for centuries.”46 Appiah may be entirely right
156Stories of Parallel Lives
about this, and it may well be a politically constructive observation, but it
is probably not the side of the question that a philosopher or cultural critic
would have chosen to emphasize in the middle of the twentieth century.
The confidence in continuity it expresses would at that time have seemed
pedestrian and presentist.
The inference I would draw is that the last forty years have not abandoned
“all sense of historical continuity and memory,” as David Harvey suggested,
but have been characterized on the contrary by a growing confidence in
continuity. Cultural intellectuals have rightly perceived this as a crisis,
however, because the prestige of historical cultivation has long hinged—as
parallel-lives stories remind us—on the premise of discontinuity. If history
is radically discontinuous then intellectuals can argue that present-day
social standards have to be qualified by historicist culture, which serves
as a placeholder for an infinite variety of possible alternate perspectives.
If, on the other hand, we have reached a point where the present is finally
right to imagine that it holds a privileged perspective, then the supplement
of historical cultivation (of “culture” as we have known it for the last two
centuries) is no longer particularly urgent.
Parallel-lives stories respond very directly to this perceived crisis: they
begin in a present that sees no alternative to its own ephemeral standards
of celebrity, and reaffirm the necessity of historical culture through a
fantasy about discontinuity, which takes the form of a mysterious gulf
separating the two layers of the narrative. While it is true that the lives of
present-day characters parallel those in the past, the parallel is not a proof
of social continuity, but an imaginative, sympathetic connection between
personalities that leaps over a long intervening period. Moreover, this parallel
remains buried, powerless to solve present-day problems, until resurrected
by historians who are exploring the peculiar literary, paleontological, or
thermodynamic preoccupations of a vanished era. The characters in a
parallel-lives story may express their anxieties about history as vaguely as
cultural critics of the s did, lamenting the disappearance of a generalized
“memory” or “permanence.”47 But the logic of fictional wish-fulfillment is
more faithful than nonfiction prose to the paradox underlying late twentiethcentury cultural crises. The fiction of the s reveals that the authority of
historicist culture depended, paradoxically, on a belief in impermanence.
6
Digital Humanities and
the Future of Literary History
P
er i o d iz at i o n h a s b een c en t r a l to literary study since the
discipline’s emergence. In the nineteenth century, periodized contrast gave middle-class writers a way of claiming cultural authority without
relying on the aristocratic premise of unbroken lineage. In the twentieth century, periodization was defended as a proof that literary history transcended
the philistine, causal continuities of the history department. But by the end
of the twentieth century, this model of literary history had lost some of its authority. I suspect literary historians are still too close to this transition, both
chronologically and emotionally, to do a good job of explaining it—so I have
largely restricted myself to description. But it may be worth briefly sketching
why explanation is difficult.
Chapter  presented the declining authority of periodized contrast in an
elegiac light, because that is generally the way popular fictions of the s
imagined it. The specificity of the past seemed to be erased by the insistent
contemporaneity of journalism, or by challenges to the print medium itself,
or by an “end of history” that flattened majestic Hegelian processions into
retro style. As we’ve seen, many of these elegiac hypotheses were echoed in the
period’s cultural theory. But one might just as persuasively drop the elegiac
tone, and present literary scholars themselves as agents who actively chose
to discard an older mode of periodized historicism. One of the leitmotifs
of new historicism, after all, was a narrowing of historical focus. This was
reflected not just in the famously anecdotal openings of articles, but in a
157
158Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
general contraction of temporal scope. Many new-historical arguments trace
connections that unfold over a span of one, or two, or five years. What was
actually happening in the Wye valley during Wordsworth’s visit? And what
was Napoleon doing that July?1
As James Chandler has shown, there was nothing absolutely new about
these fine-grained or “hot chronologies.” Moreover, it is always in principle
possible to connect temporal specificity to a larger and looser calendar.
P. B. Shelley could focus tightly on “England in ” but also zoom out to
invoke “the spirit of the age.”2 Nevertheless, it seems likely that new modes of
historicism did something to break up the authority of period concepts in the
s and s. If I may add a new-historical anecdote of my own: the first thing
I was told in graduate school, in , was to reframe questions about periods
and movements as questions about spans of time no longer than five years.3
In a sense, this tightening of focus was a logical extrapolation of the concern
with specificity that motivates historical contrast. But taken to an extreme,
historical specificity can make itself disappear. If we make the resolution of
historical representation fine enough, we end up with a smooth continuum
of events rather than a sequence of discrete cultural formations that students
could be asked to contrast to the present. Together with feminism, this finegrained and nominalistic strain of historicism may have helped motivate a
fresh round of academic critiques of periodization (on which more later).
But as I say, we may still be too close to these changes to explain how
and why they took place. It is always easy to overestimate the causal power of
academic writing. And it seems worth noting that the changes involved have
not been limited to literary periods; they involve a broader set of attitudes
about historical continuity and discontinuity.
From Henri Saint-Simon to Karl Marx to Oswald Spengler, stadial models
of history exerted a broad popular influence. Today, by contrast, popular
historical works have little to say about stages of development, and seek
instead to tease out general (if not exactly universal) principles. Works like
Guns, Germs, and Steel emphasize technological and environmental factors
that operate in multiple times and places.4 At its most exaggerated, the new
faith in continuity can amount to a Whiggish presentism—illustrated, for
instance, by Francis Fukuyama’s End of History.5 But I suspect for historians,
this popular revival of gradualist approaches to history will pose a manageable,
largely intellectual problem. The discipline of history has long seen itself as
negotiating between the opposed principles of continuity and change, and the
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
159
necessary trade-off between the two is for historians a cliché. When students
were inclined to treat periods as discrete spiritual entities with a real existence,
historians reminded them that period boundaries were only nominal and the
unity of a period largely imaginary. Today it is probably necessary to lean
harder on the opposite side of the question, reminding students that history
is not a gradient that ascends smoothly from the invention of writing to the
Internet. But both sides of that tension can be contained within history’s
institutional structures and organizing assumptions.
In literary studies, the waning prestige of periods poses a more difficult
problem, because we aren’t accustomed to viewing this topic as a negotiation
between equally valid principles. The cultural value of literary criticism has
usually been articulated in terms of discrete cultural formations (romanticism,
postmodernism), not in terms of the discipline’s power to explain continuous
change. Many literary scholars feel a commitment to discontinuity that
is almost moral in character, expressed as a celebration of fragments and
rupture, or as a critique of master narratives. This chapter argues that a habit
of narrating history as a sequence of contrasted cultural movements has
caused literary studies to develop in a one-sided way, and produced blind
spots that limit the development of the discipline. I don’t mean to suggest that
there is anything illegitimate about dividing history into discrete movements
and cultural “turns.” On the contrary, these concepts can be heuristically
useful. But they have acquired a disproportionate power in literary studies,
blinding us to other equally valid modes of historical imagination. I’ll argue
that digital and quantitative methods are a valuable addition to literary
study now, not only in their own right, but because their ability to represent
gradual, macroscopic change brings a healthy theoretical diversity to literary
historicism.
“Digital humanities” is of course a complex rubric, covering a host of
scholarly initiatives that are not explicitly quantitative, literary, or historical.
The term also embraces theories of new media and new forms of scholarly
communication. Even within literary history, digital scholarship has often
focused on individual texts, illuminating them through textual editing or
geospatial visualization. Computers can help us do many valuable things
besides Franco Moretti’s “distant reading.” But I will argue that the topic
of gradual change is a place where there is a specific, interlocking affinity
between the new capacities of digital analysis and the existing blind spots of
literary scholarship. Computers can do many things—but this is a kind of
160Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
innovation that we particularly need, and a kind that would be impossible
without digital assistance.
***
The enduring role of historical discontinuity in literary study is most
obvious, perhaps, in the period boundaries that still organize teaching and
hiring—although the cultural authority of these boundaries is increasingly
up for debate. In the late s, for instance, Susan Wolfson and William
Galperin proposed that the romantic period should be redefined as a
“Romantic Century” stretching from  to .6 The proposal bore fruit in
a triad of essays discussing the contours of nineteenth-century periodization
in the October  issue of PMLA.7 Although this challenge to romantic
periodization drew much of its energy from feminist recovery projects, it was
not at bottom an empirical claim about the early nineteenth century, but a
theoretical argument about literary history. Wolfson and Galperin advanced
various reasons to believe that – might constitute a meaningful
cultural unit, but the suspiciously round numbers they chose give the game
away. They were in effect proposing to treat literary periods as nominal
and flexible ways of directing attention to different segments of a historical
continuum.
It is too soon to say what lasting consequences may emerge from
recent proposals to define the romantic era more loosely, or from parallel
initiatives in other subfields that insist, for instance, on the plurality of
“modernisms.” As many observers pointed out at the time, the debate about
romantic periodization in the late s bore a striking resemblance to the
early-twentieth century exchange between A. O. Lovejoy and René Wellek
on “The Plurality of Romanticisms.” I’ve already traced the course of that
argument in Chapter : in practice, it failed to dent literary scholars’ reliance
on periodization, because Lovejoy’s attempt to dissolve periods into a flux of
component ideas seemed to threaten the cultural rationale for literary studies’
existence as an autonomous discipline. It wasn’t clear that teaching students
to trace processes of change would have the same kind of cultivating effect as
teaching them to appreciate romanticism.
Intellectually, the challenge to periodization has gained more ground in
recent years than it ever gained in the early twentieth century. In the titles
of scholarly books, for instance, words like “romantic” and “Victorian” have
been displaced by hyphenated pairs of dates chosen to reflect the contours of
particular topics. This might suggest that literary scholars are moving toward
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
161
historians’ looser, problem-centered, ad-hoc approach to periodization.
Moreover, literary debate about periodization increasingly takes for granted
a nominalistic view of the question—identifying it with the problem of
boundary-drawing, which is treated as a necessary evil.8 On the other hand,
this is not a question that has been decided by intellectual arguments in
the past. The power of periodization as a curricular institution, and mode
of graduate specialization, seems undiminished. And in informal contexts
one frequently hears periodization defended in terms that echo the explicitly
disciplinary rationale of Wellek’s response to Lovejoy. At a moment when
literature departments are under attack, it is said, we cannot afford to give up
concepts like “modernism” that still give our discipline popular currency.
I think contemporary discussions of periodization usually go astray
by conflating the intellectual and social dimensions of this problem—as if
the disciplinary authority of historical contrast rested on the mathematical
convenience of period boundaries. Against the drawing of temporal
boundaries no one can raise serious objections. It is arbitrary but very useful
to divide the day into twenty-four hours. Anthologies need to begin and end
somewhere. We might occasionally need to be warned about reifying such
boundaries, but if they were really arbitrary conveniences rather than social
institutions, this would be roughly as dangerous as reifying “July.”
But the authority of periodization does not rest on the convenience of
boundaries. It springs from a commitment to discontinuity that has long
defined the cultural purpose of literary studies, and that contemporary
scholars still feel as part of their disciplinary identity. This commitment to
discontinuity goes far beyond the dates of anthologies and survey courses;
it shapes critical discourse from top to bottom. One way to dramatize it is to
consider pairs of terms that describe roughly the same concept, except that
one of them approaches the concept from a diachronic and the other from a
synchronic point of view. Typically, in literary studies, the synchronic term
has more disciplinary authority. The concept of “influence” had a dubious
position in twentieth-century scholarship, for instance, because it seemed
to divert attention away from properly literary questions and toward an
argument about causal continuity. Harold Bloom made his name in great part
by solving that problem—by transforming influence from a causal concept
into one that described a timeless agonistic relationship. When the bloom
began to wear off his agonistic theory of influence, the word was replaced
by “intertextuality,” a term that even more completely elided the whole
162Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
question of temporal sequence, turning influence into a purely synchronic
question. Historians may talk about influence; literary scholars talk about
intertextuality.
The late-twentieth-century ascendance of historicism changed this
situation less than one might imagine. It remains difficult for literary
scholars to use words that explicitly foreground causal sequence—words
like “cause,” “source,” “origin,” “influence,” and “development”—without
sounding ham-handed and naïve. As graduate students, we learn to master
a set of euphemisms that allow us to make the same claims more discreetly:
we talk about the “provenance” or “context” of an idea, for instance, rather
than its “source” or “origin.” “Causes” can always be reframed as modes of
“mediation.” My point is not that these words are jargon: they have perfectly
valid uses. A “provenance” and a “source” are actually two different things,
and the choice between the terms is significant. But in literary studies, it is
hard to make that choice on purely intellectual grounds. Using language that
foregrounds continuity (“source,” “influence,” or what have you) always risks
a loss of disciplinary authority; to use Foucauldian terms, the inquiry risks
appearing merely “genetic” instead of properly “genealogical.”
In literary scholarship, moreover, the concepts of historical continuity
and fragmentation have become charged with a strange moral feeling. This
is strange, first of all, because the distinction is rhetorical and tactical rather
than substantive: in reality, contrast and continuity are inextricably fused
dimensions of social change. But the moralization of this issue is also strange
because literary scholars often misrecognize their discipline’s time-honored
preference for a rhetoric of discontinuity as being somehow subversive. This
irony became particularly evident in debates about postmodernity. Whether
they were attacking or defending postmodernism, critics tended to begin from
the assumption that the concept of historical continuity was by definition
regressive. Defenders of postmodernism would therefore celebrate its critique
of master narratives, while skeptics replied that postmodern fragmentation
was merely a cover for a nostalgic reinscription of continuity. A pair of articles
about Toni Morrison’s Beloved will serve as one typical instance of the pattern.
On the one hand, Kimberly Chabot Davis celebrated the novel’s discontinuity,
claiming that it displayed a “postmodernist suspicion of coherent and logical
historical narratives that attempt to smooth over the disorder of lived
experience.”9 On the other hand, Walter Benn Michaels argued that Beloved
actually struggles to reconstruct a stable cultural identity, using ghosts and
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
163
memories in an effort to prove historical continuity. “Continuity,” Michaels
explains, “is turned into identity.”10
Both sides of this argument took it as granted that continuous historical
narrative had a recuperative function, although they disagreed about whether
Beloved did or did not give in to that stabilizing temptation. Neither side
considered the possibility that “fragmentation” might itself be a recuperative
strategy, affirming cultural identity just as effectively in its own paradoxical
way. But this has in fact been the central strategy of English-language
literary cultivation since , when F. D. Maurice argued that the purpose
of instruction in English was to give the middle classes a sense of heritage
by bringing them into direct confrontation with a remote, apparently alien
fragment of their own past. From Paterian appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of
vanished eras, through T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition” (paradoxically transformed at
once and as a whole by each new “Individual Talent”), to postmodern critiques
of “continuous history,” literary study has consistently located cultural prestige
in moments of rupture rather than gradual and continuous change.
I’m offering this as a social generalization about the workings of prestige
in the discipline. I don’t mean to imply that literary scholars have lacked
any intellectual resources for thinking about continuity. On the contrary,
early-twentieth-century scholars influenced by the history of ideas tried to
smooth the transitions between periods by tracing the combination and
recombination of “unit ideas.” More modestly and more usefully, Raymond
Williams stressed that every cultural moment is a palimpsest of overlapping
impulses, some of which are emergent, some dominant, and some only
residual.11 As I stressed in Chapter , our discipline has had a bewilderingly
creative history, where very little goes unsaid. Our blind spots are not typically
produced by absolute suppression of perspective B; they’re produced because
structural forces in the discipline make it easy to keep returning to perspective
A. So, for instance, A. O. Lovejoy’s history of ideas was in the end displaced
by René Wellek’s mode of literary history, which reaffirmed cultural periods
as discrete entities. And while Raymond Williams’s efforts to trace gradual
transformations of ideology have been celebrated, his reputation has never
been strong enough to prevent literary scholars from returning to Michel
Foucault’s view that “continuous history is the correlate of consciousness,” a
refuge for “the sovereign subject” that needs to be disrupted and critiqued.12
Literary scholars’ enduring preference for contrast over continuity has
several different motivations. Earlier chapters of this book have traced the
164Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
history of that preference from its nineteenth-century origins, arguing that
it is bound up with cultural distinction and with a rationale for disciplinary
autonomy. But it is also, among other things, a pragmatic response to inherent
limitations of our subject. One of the primary ways other historians trace
continuity is to reason about chains of causality. This is always going to be
difficult in literary history, since the primary causes of historical change are
not usually literary. When a literary historian tries to explain large-scale
change, their explanation is likely to become less literary in proportion as
it becomes more minutely causal. Confronted with this dilemma, literary
scholars often find it simpler to fall back on contrasted case studies. In fact,
where this book leaps over long stretches of time, I have solved the problem
that way myself. There are alternate ways to trace continuity that don’t insist
on causality, but those methods tend to require a proliferation of examples
that has until recently been difficult to manage. (This is where digital methods
become essential, and I will return in a moment to the contribution they are
making.)
Thus the waning of contemporary interest in periods and movements
presents literary scholars with a uniquely acute dilemma. Historians are well
positioned to remind their readers that the distinction between “continuity”
and “contrast” is rhetorical—a choice of perspectives rather than a difference
of kind. But literary scholarship has tended to invest that same distinction
with cultural significance and moral drama. It isn’t something we can easily
discard. In fact, it can be difficult to imagine what literary history would
look like if its significance weren’t articulated as a series of fateful turns and
movements and interventions.
The weight of this disciplinary inheritance can be felt even where recent
scholarship has tried to reimagine literary history most adventurously.
Recent experiments with quantification, for instance, could in principle
allow scholars to represent change as a continuous trend, instead of arguing
about causality, or juxtaposing contrasted examples. But it is far from
clear that scholars are ready to embrace this possibility. Quantification
is controversial in the humanities for a host of reasons, of course, and the
premise of historical continuity may not seem high on the list of its sins. The
more familiar objections involve a charge of scientism. But I would argue that
many complaints about scientism boil down in practice to a suspicion that
quantification will dissolve the kinds of discontinuity that serve as containers
for the cultural value of history.
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
165
Solicitude about such containers is perhaps most often expressed as
a fear that digital approaches will erode the integrity of individual books
and authors, chewing up volumes and reducing them to flows of data. But
this is only the simplest version of a concern that can also be expressed in
more general ways. Writing about oral tradition, Maureen McLane is not
preoccupied by the autonomy of discrete aesthetic artefacts, but she does
remain troubled by a suspicion that distant reading might dissolve the “units
of analysis” that make literature culturally meaningful.
[H]ow would one even begin to identify the “unit of analysis” that would
diagnostically and comparatively cut across world-historical genres, like the
novel? It was a close, not (only) a distant, reader, who identified free-indirect
style; a close, not (only) a distant, reader, who specified the formal features of
the ballad. . . .13
McLane is particularly concerned to defend close reading, so the “units of
analysis” she offers as examples are genres, and their historicizable formal
features. But other critics of quantitative historicism have foregrounded other
“units of analysis.” In her response to Franco Moretti in Critical Inquiry, Katie
Trumpener suggests that a quantitative approach may be blind to national as
well as chronological boundaries:
Moretti is interested here in the history of British book titles during one stretch
of British literary history and has worked to acquire a systematic knowledge
of them. But his findings may not be readily generalizable for other stretches
of literary history, not even in neighboring and closely interconnected literary
cultures.14
This objection could actually apply to any critical study, since no study
can pretend to encompass all nations and all “stretches of literary history.”
But when literary scholars are responding to a study that uses quantitative
methods, they tend to invoke boundaries as if their existence constituted
a critique of quantitative historicism in particular. The response suggests
that what literary scholars have found fundamentally troubling about
quantification is its potential to dissolve the boundaries of culturally
significant entities—whether the entities in question are genres, or periods,
or national cultures.
Indeed, Moretti seems to anticipate this critique in Graphs, Maps, Trees,
where he is at pains to point out that graphs acquire meaning only when divided
into discrete segments by a human interpreter. “Quantitative data can tell us
166Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
when Britain produced one new novel per month, or week, or day, or hour for
that matter, but where the significant turning points lie along the continuum—
and why—is something that must be decided on a different basis.”15 The general
observation that data require interpretation is unassailable. But that general
observation becomes fused here with a more specific assumption that graphs
need to be interpreted by locating certain “turning points” that divide them
into significant segments or phases. The rest of Moretti’s chapter on “Graphs”
pursues this segmented approach very successfully, identifying different stages
in the rise of the novel and characterizing genres as discrete “cycles” that can
be picked out of the apparently smooth curve of publication statistics. The
chapter has already become a contemporary classic—indicating, I think, that
Moretti chose the right approach for his audience. Humanists do prefer graphs
once they are divided into discrete phases and cycles. But that isn’t the only way
to interpret graphs. It is easy to envision a graph with no significant turning
points at all—a line or curve that ascends or descends smoothly from one edge
of the page to the other. A graph of that form could be highly meaningful. But
Moretti was canny not to try to persuade humanists with that sort of example.
Quantitative methods will be easier for us to assimilate when they conform to
our preference for discontinuity—a fit that is entirely possible to achieve when
the object of study is a periodizable subgenre like the epistolary novel. But
“distant reading” does also have the potential to trouble literary historicism
more profoundly, because quantification can make it possible to describe
change without articulating it as a series of discrete phases at all. This presents
literary scholars with a genuine opportunity, but one that may be difficult to
seize.
Let me illustrate with a bit of evidence I recently discovered myself. I’m
fairly certain this finding could matter for literary scholars: it reveals that a
specialized literary diction emerged in the nineteenth century. But in trying
to articulate the significance of this graph, I have found that I have to work
against the grain of narrative patterns that ordinarily make significance
legible in my discipline.
This graph (see Fig. ) is based on a collection of , English-language
volumes that Jordan Sellers and I assembled, covering the period from 
to . Volumes were drawn from several different sources, including TCPECCO and the Brown Women Writers Project; Sellers also selected many
volumes by hand. For readers interested in the details, most of our collection
is available online, through the Journal of Digital Humanities.16
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
3.0
167
Occurrences of words that entered
English before 1150, divided by
occurrences of those that entered
1150–1699, in three genres
2.5
Genre
Poetry
Prose fiction
Nonfiction
2.0
1.5
1.0
1750
1800
1850
Fig. 3. The differentiation of diction in three genres, 1700–1899.
The individual data points plotted on the graph reflect yearly ratios
between two lists of words: those that entered the English language before
, and those that entered the language between  and . We excluded
proper nouns, abbreviations, determiners, prepositions, and pronouns. We
also excluded words that were coined after , because we were not interested
in charting lexical innovation as such. Our interest in etymology was based
instead on the sociolinguistic observation that the older part of the English
lexicon tends to be used more heavily in less formal contexts. Old English
words are used more commonly in speech, for instance—whereas words of
French and Latin provenance are common in writing, and especially formal
writing.17 We wondered whether we could use this fact to reveal broad changes
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diction. We chose to divide the lexicon
at  instead of  because the real watershed that gives English etymology
social significance is less the Norman Invasion itself than the subsequent
two hundred years—a period when English was almost exclusively spoken.
168Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
Words that survived this period had to be used in speech; those borrowed
after it were often borrowed to flesh out a literate vocabulary that had become
impoverished.
For this historical reason, we expected that etymology would reveal
shifting levels of formality, or what linguists call the social “register” of
writing. What we didn’t expect to discover was that these changes would
affect different genres so differently. In nonfiction prose, for instance, the
older part of the lexicon becomes relatively less common in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, whereas in poetry it becomes more common. One might
infer that poetry was becoming less formal, or more like the spoken language.
But specific conclusions about individual genres are less striking here than
the broader pattern of differentiation. By the end of the nineteenth century
there’s a gulf between diction in different genres that had not previously
existed. Moreover, this appears to be a broad differentiation between literary
and non-literary diction, because fiction and drama change in ways that
closely parallel poetry. (I haven’t included drama in this illustration, because
it’s difficult to make four different sets of points legible in a black-and-white
graph. But drama has a trajectory very similar to the trajectory of fiction.)
A new gulf opens up in this period between all three “literary” genres and
nonfiction prose.
This kind of evidence allows us to trace a new, distinctively literary diction,
which emerges along with the modern concept of literature as a category of
writing set apart by fictive and aesthetic aims. That is clearly a result with
literary-historical significance. But I have found it hard to articulate the
importance of a finding like this without falling back on a rhetoric of decisive
turning points and interventions that tends to distort the evidence.
For instance, when I try to describe this research to colleagues, I am often
asked what it tells us about romanticism. In a way this is a logical question:
just eyeballing the graph, it does appear that several trend lines bend in the
late eighteenth century. And there would be plausible ways to turn this into
a story about romanticism. For instance, you could observe that evidence of
a growing differentiation between poetry and prose ought to complicate our
reception of William Wordsworth’s claim that he was resisting “those who
by their reasonings have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt
Prose and Metrical composition.”18 After Wordsworth, poetic language did
become more accessible, and perhaps even more like speech, but that is not
to say that it became less specialized. Personification of abstract ideas may
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
169
have declined, but in some broader ways “the space of separation betwixt
Prose and Metrical composition” increased very markedly in the nineteenth
century.
I find those quotations from Wordsworth do effectively dramatize
this result for an audience of literary scholars. And yet there’s something
specious about the rhetorical strategy that would make a two-century trend
comprehensible by linking it to a famous intervention by a single author.
Even the term “romanticism” is inadequate here. The truth is that the space
of separation between poetry and nonfiction prose widens steadily, in our
collection, from  to . It widens more rapidly in the nineteenth century
than in the eighteenth, but there’s no reason to assume that the new pace
of change—which is sustained throughout the nineteenth century—was
a consequence of “romanticism,” or of anything that happened specifically
around the year . In fact, when Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac observed
loosely similar trends in the language of nineteenth-century fiction, they
associated those trends with “a fundamental shift in narration from telling to
showing” that we tend to associate with Victorian realist novels rather than
romantic poetry.19
Instead of ascribing a causal role to literary movements like “romanticism”
or genres like “the realist novel,” it might be better to say that those genres and
movements were themselves participating in broader discursive trends. Trends
of this kind play out on a scale that literary scholars aren’t accustomed to
describing, and it may take decades for us to figure out how to describe them.
As a first stab at the problem, I have hinted that the linguistic changes traced
above may have been linked to the emergence of literature as a specifically
aesthetic category. Elsewhere, I have used text-mining methods to argue at
more length that the specialization of literary diction was related to a growing
tendency to identify literature with subjective experience—a trend that I see
as bound up with nineteenth-century notions of aesthetic cultivation.20
That argument may be right or wrong; I will not pursue it at length here.
In the present context, I’m interested in making a broader meta-argument
about the difficulty of grappling with this sort of evidence. In principle,
literary scholars should be able to move back and forth between different
kinds of historical argument, invoking continuity or contrast as necessary
for a particular thesis. But in practice, we find it very difficult to make
arguments about continuous, gradual change. It runs against the grain of
many disciplinary preferences.
170Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
Many literary scholars are simply wary of the quantitative analysis that is
required to make trends on this scale visible. But that wariness, I have argued,
is itself partly a consequence of our disciplinary investment in discontinuity.
In other words, the problem with quantitative arguments is that they tend to
produce generalizations of a fluid kind that resist translation into the familiar
entities of literary-historical argument (a literary movement, an emblematic
author, a cultural turn). If you want the significance of your research to be
recognized, this sort of methodological novelty is not helpful. So scholars
pursuing quantitative research into literary history have a strong incentive to
frame arguments as if they did have a more conventional payoff—as if digital
methods could help us identify “influential authors” or “cultural turning
points.” I think this is one of the most significant pitfalls confronting digital
scholarship in our discipline: the assumption that quantitative methods need
to prove their value by answering the kinds of questions a more traditional
interpretive agenda would have posed.
Recent moves toward “distant” or “quantitative” reading can provide a
healthy methodological diversification for literary studies—a counterweight
to our long-established preference for case studies and contrast. But in order
for that diversification to work, we need to let quantitative methods do what
they do best: map broad patterns and trace gradients of change. That is harder
than it sounds, because literary scholars are not trained to appreciate gradients.
Results of that kind can look like a scientistic intrusion into our discipline: it’s
easy to feel that the results would be better and more humanistic if only they
were less abstract, less impersonal, less continuous.
For instance, scholars often suggest that quantitative methods would be
more appropriately humanistic if they were applied on a smaller scale, or if
they did more to illuminate the subtle differences between individual works.21
I hope it is clear that I have nothing against close reading: there is a fair amount
of it in this volume. But I think it is a mistake to expect new methods to solve
old problems. There is no technical reason why quantitative methods cannot
be applied to individual works. But human readers are already very good at
interpreting writing at that scale, and it may be a long time before computers
add much to our achievements. On the other hand, we find it difficult to
reason about continuous gradients of change involving thousands of volumes.
In that domain, we are probably overlooking important patterns because
they happen to be invisible on the scale of reading we ordinarily inhabit. To
appreciate those patterns as significant contributions to literary history, we
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
171
will need to overcome skepticism not just about quantitative evidence, but
about historical continuity as such.
The shift I’m describing would entail a diversification of literary study,
introducing new methods and new disciplinary projects, but it needn’t
compel us to abandon any aspect of the present curriculum. Certainly I
don’t mean to suggest that we abandon period boundaries themselves. I have
traced the history of periodization in order to show that it is an institution
deeply rooted in literary scholars’ conception of their own social role. But to
trace the social history of an idea is not necessarily to critique the idea itself.
Exposing students to historical difference may not be the only purpose of
literary study, but it remains an important purpose, and as long as we intend
to dramatize historical difference, some system of chronological boundaries
will remain inevitable. Periodization may perhaps become less central to
the social organization of the discipline, but I see no reason to imagine that
literature departments will stop teaching period surveys.
Reframing the relation between contrast and continuity in literary studies
would, however, have institutional consequences. René Wellek may have
been right to feel that periodization kept literary history distinct from other
disciplines. Critical description of individual works, authors, and periods is
a task that literary scholars can have mostly to themselves, because few other
disciplines attempt it. But as we expand the discipline to include questions
about gradual change, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw clear
disciplinary boundaries. Many disciplines are interested in social behavior,
or processes of change, or ways of discerning patterns in large collections
of data. It has already become difficult to separate literary scholarship from
linguistics, history, and sociology. It now appears that the discipline could
overlap in places with computer science. In other words, the consequence
of reframing literary historicism more broadly might not be that “periods”
disappear, but that literary history becomes ever more permeable to other
disciplines.
Although deans often praise interdisciplinarity, it is far from
uncontroversial among professors. Over the last decade, several literary
scholars have cast a skeptical eye at the very idea of interdisciplinarity. 22
The boundary between literature and science, especially, is fraught: even
some scholars who identify as digital humanists are concerned that it might
be crossed too easily or in the wrong ways. In “Humanistic Theory and
Digital Scholarship,” Johanna Drucker suggests that humanists who borrow
172Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
computational methods are liable to get the worse half of the bargain, since
“computational environments” are designed on the assumption that “objects
of knowledge can be understood as self-identical, self-evident, ahistorical, and
autonomous.” The premise of a fundamental epistemological divide between
the sciences and the humanities is so widely shared that writers rarely feel
a need to articulate it as clearly as Drucker. More commonly, epithets like
“scientistic” posit some boundary as normative without pausing to define
it. But it’s not clear that even Drucker has produced a persuasive account of
the norms involved here. Computer scientists who spend their whole careers
struggling to find patterns in messy data—using statistics, the science of
uncertainty—might be taken aback by her claim that their discipline takes
objects of knowledge as “self-evident.” For that matter, Marxist and materialist
critics might be surprised by her tendency to identify “the humanities” with
perspectivalism: “humanistic expression is always observer dependent.”23
Arguments of this kind don’t separate the humanities from the sciences so
much as they separate a particular kind of humanistic argument (organized
contrastively by individual cases) from a kind of argument that discusses
trends and aggregates.
I don’t mean to criticize Drucker in particular: her essay is unusual only
in its conscientious effort to articulate widely-shared assumptions. I think
the mistake here is collective: we assume we have—but don’t actually have—
any consensus account of the difference between scientific and humanistic
learning. Perhaps one will emerge. But lacking such an account, I am
strongly tempted to infer that the difference is mostly social. Of course there
are methodological differences between disciplines: textual interpretation is
more important in literary study, for instance, than in history or psychology.
But our habit of grouping disciplines into “humanities,” “natural sciences,”
and “social sciences” seems to me contingent. (It is certainly a recent
development: “the humanities” united a looser federation of “arts and
letters” and opposed them clearly to “social science” only in the twentieth
century.) I think this system of organization is supported less by inherent
differences of subject matter than by assumptions about the social purpose
of different fields. The sciences are expected to explain the world, and to
provide instrumental knowledge for manipulating it. The humanities have
been expected instead to provide cultivation—which means, among other
things, that they claim to give students a way of internalizing the collective
past.
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
173
In the humanities, accusations of scientism are thus often expressions of
concern that a particular project may undermine the cultural rationale for
humanistic study. In the s and s, that was explicitly what critics meant
when they rejected continuous literary history as “scientistic”: they were
concerned that the cultivating mission of the discipline was being forgotten
in a quest for mere factual knowledge. We invoke the cultivating mission of
literary history less openly these days—perhaps because, after reading John
Guillory’s Cultural Capital, we are no longer very certain what that mission
would be.24 But it is clear, at any rate, that accusations of scientism posit a
goal for the humanities that is fundamentally distinct from the goals of other
disciplines—a goal that even needs to be protected from close contact with
their methods.
To put this another way, literary study has developed a deep preoccupation
with its own disciplinary autonomy. To refute a proposal, it is sometimes
sufficient to say that it would subordinate literature to the methods of another
discipline. This habit of argument was already strongly developed in the early
twentieth century; contemporary questions about enrollment and funding
only add to its urgency. But this is a situation that most readers probably
already recognize: I think I have reached the limit of what I can add to this
topic impartially and descriptively.
Personally, I believe a preoccupation with disciplinary autonomy is
hindering rather than helping literary scholarship. A defensive and selfenclosing strategy might not be the best way to promote a discipline even if its
identity were really in peril. And in practice, I suspect the danger of blurring
our disciplinary identity is often exaggerated by slippery-slope assumptions.
For instance, René Wellek was probably right that a strongly periodized
approach to literature served to separate literature from social history. In
recent years the weakening of periodization has accompanied a weakening
of the boundary between those disciplines, and we are now well beyond the
perilous situation he described, where “topics like ‘Women as Healers in
Mediaeval Life and Literature’ are being accepted by the foremost American
universities for the doctorate in English.” But this confusion of disciplines has
not necessarily had the consequence he projected—that “all distinctions will
fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature
will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or
that neighboring discipline.”25 Instead, English departments seem capable of
integrating the contributions of other disciplines (from women’s studies to
174Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
psychology to information science), while still finding literature valuable in
its own right.
It is true that in the process something has been lost. Toward the end of
the twentieth century, literature departments quietly stopped claiming to
provide a generalized culture distinct from mere learning. As I mentioned
at the beginning of this chapter, it may be hard to say whether the discipline
jumped off that cliff or was pushed. In any case, something was sacrificed, and
I suspect the memory of that sacrifice is largely responsible for the intensity
of our contemporary preoccupation with disciplinary identity. Literary critics
seem to feel that we have just given away a great deal of cultural capital, and
can’t afford to lose more! But—again, speaking personally—I don’t believe
our discipline needs to be defended as culture. It can be defended perfectly
well as a form of learning congruent to the intellectual projects of other
disciplines. Moreover, it seems to me a form of learning that has excelled
especially in roving beyond its own boundaries. Literary scholars do have
special areas of expertise in language and literary form, but our tradition is
impressive above all because of its synthetic and eclectic character. Literary
scholars have been brilliant improvisers, pulling together Marx and Freud,
Saussure and Arendt, to explain complex intersections between language,
psychology, and historical change.
I would suggest that the educational mission of our discipline is not
distinctively cultural, but fundamentally similar to the mission of other
disciplines: to teach students to appreciate complexity, challenge their own
assumptions, and thoughtfully weigh different kinds of evidence. To be
sure, the complexity we grapple with will usually be figurative, linguistic,
and historical. Quantitative methods will play a small role, limited mainly
to macroscopic questions where it would otherwise be difficult to get a clear
view of the subject. But this doesn’t mean that quantitative methods need to
be strictly regulated, lest they infect the discipline with an alien scientism. On
the contrary, I would argue that they provide a much-needed methodological
diversity, allowing us to take a fresh look at the tension between continuity
and contrast, which our discipline has often treated in a one-sided way.
Departments of literature feel beleaguered at the moment, and I think it
is true that our familiar stock-in-trade (while still valuable) no longer confers
the same prestige it once did. But this is also a moment of enormous potential
for literary study, if we’re willing to embrace new challenges. There is certainly
a gulf between the gradualist models of change that often prevail in the social
Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History
175
and natural sciences, and familiar, contrastive modes of literary history that
seek to define the unique character of a work, author, or period. But we can
make it our job to bridge that gulf. Someone has to teach students how to
understand discourse in a way that combines different methods and scales of
analysis: it might as well be us.
Notes
Introduction
. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
. William Morton Payne, ed., English in American Universities (Boston: D. C.
Heath, ), –, .
. For historicism and antiquity, see Salvatore Settis, The Future of the Classical, trans. A. Cameron (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, ). For theories of “uneven
development,” see James Chandler, England in  (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ), –.
. John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” in The Poems of John
Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, ), .
. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: , , , ed. Jonathan Wordsworth,
M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, ), –.
. For these motifs in Tolstoy, see Ted Underwood, “Historical Difference as
Immortality in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel.” Modern Language Quarterly 
(): –.
. See especially Emma Willard, A System of Universal History, in Perspective
(Hartford: F. J. Huntington, ).
. Frederick Denison Maurice, Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate
the Nation? (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, ), .
. See, for instance, Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Prince­
ton University Press, ).
. Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
. Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages
177
178Notes to the Introduction and Chapter 1
to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ),
–.
. Thomas Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, th ed.,  vols.
(London, ), : .
. For transformations of “tradition” in the romantic era, see James Chandler,
Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, ), –.
. Keats, Poems of John Keats, .
. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E.
Fields (New York: Free Press, ), .
. William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven:
Yale University Press, ), –.
. James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill, intro. Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), .
. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, vol.  of Works,  vols.
(London, ), .
. Ted Underwood, “If Romantic Historicism Shaped Modern Fundamentalism,
Would That Count as Secularization?,” European Romantic Review . (): –.
. Reuben Post Halleck, History of English Literature (New York: American Book
Company, ), .
. Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” in Essential Works,
 vols., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), : . See also Foucault,
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works, : –.
. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .
Chapter 1
. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. George Gibian (New York: Norton, ), .
. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, ), .
. Nicola Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and
Others (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), xix–xx.
. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), .
. Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the
Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), , . For the background of
this debate, see also Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical
Writing in Britain, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, ), .
. Edward Coke, The Compleat Copy-Holder (London: ), –, .
Notes to Chapter 1
179
. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,”
in Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
. Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos
into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), –. See also
Raymond Williams’s reflections on history-as-process in “History,” in Keywords: A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, ),
–.
. Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , –.
. As Ruth Mack has argued, the reification of historicity in objects has a longer
history in the eighteenth-century novel. See Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
), –.
. Birgitta Berglund, Woman’s Whole Existence: The House as an Image in the
Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen, Lund Studies in English , ed. Sven Bäckman and Jan Svartvik (Lund: Lund University Press, ) –
.
. Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, ed. Alison Milbank
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (,
rpt. Poole: Woodstock Books, ), : .
. Marilyn Butler, “The Woman at the Window: Ann Radcliffe in the Novels of
Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen,” in Gender and Literary Voice, ed. Janet Todd
(New York: Holmes and Meier, ), –.
. Radcliffe, Sicilian Romance, : .
. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, ed. Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), , .
. Ibid., .
. James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill, intro. Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . For
Macpherson’s historicism, see also Ted Underwood, “Romantic Historicism and the
Afterlife,” PMLA  (): –.
. Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, , .
. Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, , .
. Ibid., .
. Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, , –, –.
. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of
Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), .
. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), .
. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, , , .
. Susan Hegeman has argued that the descriptive/anthropological and nor-
180Notes to Chapter 1
mative/literary senses of “culture” in fact remain intertwined even in the twentieth
centuy. See Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, ), –.
. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, ),
–.
. As Barry Sloane points out, Morgan’s Irish nationalism aims to ameliorate,
rather than end, colonial subjection. [Barry Sloan, The Pioneers of Anglo-Irish Fiction,
– (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, ), –.] Joep Leersen has amplified this
observation by stressing that Morgan’s national tales represent Ireland for, and largely
from the perspective of, English outsiders. [Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), .] Mary Jean
Corbett, on the other hand, has emphasized the novel’s power to re-educate English
readers. [Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, –
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.]
. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed.
Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (London: Pickering and Chatto, ), , .
. Ibid., , –.
. Ibid., n.
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., , –.
. For the “patriotic” background to this assumption, see Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, –.
. Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, , .
. Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy,  vols. (London: Henry
Colburn, ), : , . For the “relative autonomy” of the cultural field, see Pierre
Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), –.
. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, O’Donnel, a national tale,  vols. (London: H.
Colburn, ), : xi–xii.
. Sloane, Pioneers of Anglo-Irish Fiction, .
. Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, .
. Owenson, O’Donnel, : .
. Ibid., : .
. Corbett, Allegories of Union, –.
. Owenson, O’Donnel, : –.
. The figurative strategy here loosely resembles the mode of “nostalgia” that
Nicholas Dames has traced in Jane Austen: the continuity of O’Donnel’s memories is
suppressed in order to reduce his past to a set of moments that acquire an implicitly
collective character. Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
Notes to Chapter 1
181
. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British
Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –.
. “I agree with you that Lady Morgan has fairly hit upon her forte—for
O’Donnell [sic] is incomparably superior to the Wild Irish Girl—having nature and
reality for its foundation.” Sir Walter Scott, Letters,  vols., ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, ), : .
. The tendency to separate the works of Morgan and Scott into different genres
persists even in recent studies of the connection between them. Although her groundbreaking account complicates the genealogy of historical fiction, Katie Trumpener
does tend to treat Morgan as a writer of national tales, and Scott as a historical novelist (Bardic Nationalism, –). Similarly, although Ina Ferris emphasizes the connections between Morgan’s work and Scott’s, she sees them divided by fundamentally
different representations of time (Ferris, Romantic National Tale, ).
. Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, ), .
. Shaw distinguishes Guy Mannering from other historical novels by emphasizing that it uses the past mainly (and more than usual for Scott) as a pastoral canvas on which to project present-day concerns. Harry Shaw, The Forms of Historical
Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), ,
–.
. For the social significance of “romance” in Scott, and particularly in Guy
Mannering, see Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Jane Millgate compares the
plots of The Antiquary and Guy Mannering in Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –.
. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, – (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –.
. For connections between Guy Mannering and colonialism, see Trumpener,
Bardic Nationalism, –. For the influence of the Napoleonic wars on Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, see Shaw, Forms of Historical Fiction, –.
. Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New York: Atheneum,
), , –. For an important extension and qualification of this argument, see
Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ), –.
. Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, , .
. Yoon Sun Lee, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), .
. Shawn Malley, “Walter Scott’s Romantic Archaeology: New/Old Abbotsford
and The Antiquary,” Studies in Romanticism . (): –.
. Chrystal Croftangry’s estate becomes a meaningful embodiment of tradition
only after he loses it and reads about it in the pages of an old document. When he is
given a chance to recover part of the estate, he sets up instead as an antiquarian writer.
I would like to thank Anne Frey for directing my attention to this episode. Walter
182Notes to Chapters 1 and 2
Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate, ed. Claire Lamont (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –, –.
. Duncan, Modern Romance, .
. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed. P. D. Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), , .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., , .
. For the history of déjà vu, see Peter Krapp, Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural
Memory (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis University Press, ).
. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), .
. Scott, Guy Mannering, .
. Owenson, Florence Macarthy, : .
. Harry Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, ), .
. Scott, Guy Mannering, .
. For the history of Scott’s relationship to Williamina Forbes, and her presence
in The Antiquary, see A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
. Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), , .
. See Lee, Nationalism and Irony, –. I part company here from Joan S.
Elbers, “Isolation and Community in The Antiquary,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 
(): –. Elbers sees Lovel as a synthesis of his symbolic father (Aldobrand Oldbuck) and his biological father (the Catholic Earl of Glenallan). This is an odd claim,
since Lovel’s character in fact has nothing in common with the earl’s. Elbers rightly
senses that The Antiquary is torn between two ideals that divided public allegiance
in the s: a Whiggish individualism and a Burkean reverence for tradition. But
revisiting those principles some twenty years later, The Antiquary is in a position to do
something more pointed than compromise between them.
Chapter 2
. Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools (New York: Routledge, ), , .
. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in
Britain, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –.
. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic
Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –.
. Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos
into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” Futures Past: On the Seman-
Notes to Chapter 2
183
tics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press,
), –.
. Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History, and General Policy, To Which is Prefixed,
An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life,  vols. (Philadelphia:
P. Byrne, ), : .
. Ibid., : .
. Ibid., : .
. Ibid., : .
. Daniel Rosenberg, “Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern
Time,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture  (): –, , .
. Joseph Priestley, A Description of a New Chart of History (London: J. Johnson,
), , .
. John Bigland, Letters on the Study and Use of Ancient and Modern History
(Philadelphia: ), iii–iv, .
. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Dialogue in the Shades,” in The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin,  vols. (London: Longman, ), : ,
.
. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Retrospection: or, a Review of the Most Striking and
Important Events, Characters, and Situations, and their Consequences, which the Last
Eighteen Hundred Years have Presented to the View of Mankind,  vols. (London: John
Stockdale, ), vii.
. William Howitt and Mary Howitt, “A Hymn of the Night,” in The Desolation
of Eyam; The Emigrant, A Tale of the American Woods; and Other Poems (London:
Wightman and Cramp, ), , –.
. Felicia Hemans, “The Treasures of the Deep,” in Selected Poems, Prose, and
Letters, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough: Broadview, ), –.
. Victor Hugo, “La pente de la rêverie,” in Les feuilles d’automne (Paris: Renduel, ), –.
. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stil­
linger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), –.
. Thomas Burnet, A Treatise Concerning the State of Departed Souls, trans. J.
Dennis (London: ), .
. Denis Diderot and Étienne Maurice Falconet, Le pour et le contre, correspondance polemique sur la respect de la posterité, Pline, et les anciens auteurs qui ont parlé de
peinture et de sculpture (Paris: Éditeurs français réunis, ), , –. My translation.
. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), : –.
. James Macpherson, “The War of Caros,” in The Poems of Ossian, and Related
Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), .
. William Hazlitt, “On Different Sorts of Fame,” in The Round Table (Edinburgh: Constable, ), .
. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Sämtliche Werke,
vol.  (Munich: Hanser, ), .
184Notes to Chapter 2
. Felicia Hemans, “The Voice of the Wind,” in Poetical Works (London: Oxford
University Press, ), .
. Ibid.
. Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, ).
. Felicia Hemans, “Communings with Thought,” in Selected Poems, Prose, and
Letters, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough: Broadview, ), –.
. Henry St. John, lord viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (London: ), .
. John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” in Poems of John
Keats, .
. My attention to Keats’s alienation from, and transformation of, cultural prestige is indebted to Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ).
. R. Johnson, An Introduction to the Study of History (London: ), .
. “Observations on the Study of History,” in Janus; or, the Edinburgh Literary
Almanack (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, ), .
. James Shergold Boone, An Essay on the Study of Modern History (London:
John Warren, ), –.
. “More Surnames,” in The Spirit of the Public Journals, for the Year  (London: Sherwood, Jones, and Co., ), . The metaphor is directly echoed in a number of later-nineteenth-century works—for example, Thomas Lewin, Fasti Sacri; or
a Key to the Chronology of the New Testament (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
), iii: “Chronology in history is what perspective is in painting.”
. Emma Willard, A System of Universal History, in Perspective (Hartford, CT:
F. J. Huntington, ), iii.
. Ibid., iv.
. Emma Willard, History of the United States, or Republic of America (Philadelphia: A. S. Barnes, ), iv.
. Ibid., v.
. Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Andrew Hook (London:
Penguin, ), .
. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “On Mitford’s History of Greece,” in Miscellaneous Writings,  vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, ), :
, . The article first appeared in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, November .
. Ibid., : , , .
. Ibid., : , .
. Ibid., : –.
. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” in Miscellaneous Writings,  vols.
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, ), : –. First appeared in
the Edinburgh Review, May .
. Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of “Culture,”
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.
Notes to Chapters 2 and 3
185
. “A Proclamation,” Punch  (January , ): . This article is discussed in
David Skilton, “Contemplating the Ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and
Others,” in Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London
. (), http: //www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march/index.html.
Chapter 3
. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in
India (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Robert Crawford, ed. The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Jo
McMurtry, English Language, English Literature: The Creation of an Academic Discipline (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, ). Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, – (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, ). Viswanathan’s book has convinced many readers that the discipline of English literature developed first in a colonial context. That would be an
appealing thesis, but for practical purposes the developments in England and India
seem close to simultaneous (the s are a crucial decade in both contexts).
. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature, –, .
. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,  vols. (London: W. Strahan
and T. Cadell, ), : –, : . Vicesimus Knox, ed., Elegant Extracts, or Useful
and Entertaining Passages in Prose,  vols. (London: C. Dilly, ).
. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England – (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
. John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta; or, the Diversions of Purley,  vols., nd ed.
(London: J. Johnson, , ), : , –, .
. Aarsleff, Study of Language in England, .
. Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, : .
. Ibid., : .
. Ibid., : . Thomas Paine, quoted in Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language
– (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), .
. Walter Whiter, Etymologicon Universale; or Universal Etymological Dictionary,
 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, –).
. James C. McCusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –.
. John Trusler, The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous, in the
English Language; and, the Proper Choice of them Determined,  vols. (London: ),
.
. “English Synonymes Discriminated,” Quarterly Review  (): –.
. William Taylor, English Synonyms Discriminated (London: W. Pople, ),
.
. Ibid., xix.
186Notes to Chapter 3
. Ibid., .
. Statement by the Council of the University of London, Explanatory of the Nature
and Objects of the Institution (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green,
), , .
. Thomas Dale, “Senior Class; English Philology and Rhetoric,” King’s College
Calendar –, King’s College Archives, London, –.
. Thomas Dale, “Junior Class; English Language,” King’s College Calendar –
, King’s College Archives, London, .
. Thomas Dale, “English Literature: Senior and Junior Classes,” King’s College
Calendar –, King’s College Archives, London, . See also Thomas Dale, “A Brief
Analysis of Early English Literature for the Use of Students in the Class of English
Philology and Rhetoric,” King’s College Calendar –, King’s College Archives,
London, –.
. Thomas Dale, “Principles and Practice of English Composition: Junior Class,”
King’s College Calendar –, King’s College Archives, London, .
. Taylor, English Synonyms Discriminated, .
. Henry Rogers, “Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Structure of the English
Language,” Edinburgh Review  (): .
. Ibid., .
. Henry Rogers, General Introduction to a Series of Lectures on English Grammar
and Composition (London: William Ball and Taylor and Walton, ), .
. R. G. Latham, An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London,
October ,  (London: Taylor and Walton, ), .
. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge,  vols. (New York: Harper, ), : .
. Thomas DeQuincey, “The English Language,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine  (): .
. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature, , .
. Taylor, English Synonyms Discriminated, .
. Alan Bacon, “English Literature Becomes a University Subject: King’s College,
London as Pioneer,” Victorian Studies  (): .
. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature, .
. Frederick Denison Maurice, “Introductory Lecture by the Professor of English Literature and Modern History at King’s College, London,” Educational Magazine, new series,  (): .
. Dale, “English Literature,” .
. Frederick Denison Maurice, Exam on “English Literature,” King’s College Calendar for –, item , King’s College Archives, London. Frederick Denison Maurice, Exam on “The Tudors,” The Calendar of King’s College, London, for – (London: John W. Parker, ), .
. Frederick Denison Maurice, Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate
the Nation? (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, ), .
. Ibid., , .
Notes to Chapter 3
187
. Ibid., , , .
. Ibid., –.
. Maurice, “Introductory Lecture,” , .
. Ibid., .
. Augustin Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France (Paris: Tessier, ), . My
translation.
. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, ), . My translation.
. François Guizot, Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de
l’empire Romain jusqu’a la révolution Française, th ed. (Paris: Didier, ), –.
. Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands, th
ed.,  vols. (Paris: Just Tessier, ), : .
. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” in Miscellaneous Writings,  vols.
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, ), : , .
. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in
Britain, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –.
. Edward S. Creasy, The Spirit of Historical Study: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London, October ,  (London: Taylor and Walton, ),
.
. Benjamin Heath Malkin, An Introductory Lecture on History, Delivered in the
University of London (London: John Taylor, ), .
. Robert Vaughan, On the Study of General History, an Introductory Lecture
Delivered in the University of London (London: John Taylor, ), –.
. Creasy, Spirit of Historical Study, .
. J. A. Cramer, An Inaugural Lecture on the Study of Modern History (Oxford:
John Henry Parker, ), .
. A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts; or a Parallel Betweeen the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the
Present Decay of Taste (Salisbury: for the Author, ).
. Maurice, Has the Church, .
. Ibid., .
. Minutes of the Council of King’s College, London, Thursday, October , ,
College Archives.
. F. D. Maurice, “Letter to Miss G. Hare,” May , , in Life,  vols. (New
York: Scribner’s, ), : .
. Richard W. Schoch, “‘We do Nothing but Enact History’: Thomas Carlyle
Stages the Past,” Nineteenth-Century Literature . (): .
. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, ), .
. Creasy, Spirit of Historical Study, , , .
. R. G. Latham, “Letter to Henry Malden,” October , , letter # in College Correspondence, University College Archives, London.
. The Calendar of King’s College, London, for – (London: John W. Parker,
188Notes to Chapters 3 and 4
), . The Calendar of King’s College, London, for – (London: John W. Parker,
), .
. Charles H. Pearson, “Letter to R. W. Jelf,” June , KA/IC/P in King’s College, London, Council Minutes, College Archives.
. “There are certain differences of style in English writing of the reigns of Elizabeth, Anne, and Victoria. Describe and account for them.” Henry Morley, examination, The University College, London, Calendar for the Session – (London: James
Walton, ), xxxvii.
. The University College, London, Calendar for the Session – (London: Walton and Maberley, ), .
. William Morton Payne, ed., English in American Universities (Boston: D. C.
Heath, ), –, .
Chapter 4
. Annual Register of the University of Chicago, – (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, ), .
. Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press,
), .
. William Henry Schofield, Chivalry in English Literature: Chaucer, Malory,
Spenser and Shakespeare, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature  (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, ).
. A seminar in comparative literature was offered by the English Department
at the University of California through most of the first two decades of the twentieth
century. See, for instance, University of California Register, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), : .
. Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, Comparative Literature (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench and Co., ), vi, , .
. Ibid., .
. Alastair Mackenzie, The Evolution of Literature (New York: T. Y. Crowell and
Co., ).
. Ibid., .
. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe,
Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
), vii.
. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), xi.
. “General Literature,” Annual Register of the University of Chicago, –
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
. Harvard University Catalogue, – (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
).
. Bulletin of the State University of Kentucky, – (Lexington: State University
of Kentucky, ).
Notes to Chapter 4
189
. Annual Register of the University of Chicago, – (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, ), .
. Bulletin of the State University of Kentucky – (Lexington: State University
of Kentucky, ), .
. University of California Announcement of Courses – (Berkeley: University
of California Press, ), .
. University of Illinois Annual register, – (Urbana, IL: Published by the
University, ), –.
. Catalogue of Radcliffe College, – (Cambridge, ), –.
. Leland Stanford Junior University Bulletin, – (n.p.: Stanford University
Press, ), .
. Michael Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: –
,” Criticism  (): –.
. California Announcement of Courses, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Announcements: The University of Chicago – (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), .
. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –.
. John Livingston Lowes, “The Modern Language Association and Humane
Scholarship,” PMLA , suppl. (): , quoted ibid., .
. Norman Foerster, The American Scholar: A Study in Litterae Inhumaniores
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, ), –, , ix, .
. Ibid., .
. A. O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA  (): ,
, .
. Robert J. Griffin, “A Critique of Romantic Periodization,” in The Challenge
of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New
York: Garland, ), .
. René Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History: II.” Comparative Literature  (): .
. René Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History: I.” Comparative Literature  (): .
. Graff, Professing Literature, –.
. Mark Parker, “Measure and Countermeasure: The Lovejoy-Wellek Debate and
Romantic Periodization,” in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), , –.
. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and Co., ), .
. Ibid., –, –.
. Ibid., .
. René Wellek, “Literary History,” in Literary Scholarship: Its Aims and Methods, ed. Norman Foerster (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ),
.
190Notes to Chapters 4 and 5
. See Parker, “Measure and Countermeasure,” ; and Griffin, “Critique of
Romantic Periodization,” –.
. René Wellek, “The Crisis in Comparative Literature,” in Proceedings of the
Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, ), , , .
. Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” in Essential Works, 
vols., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), –.
. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works, vol. ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), , –.
. Kenneth Surin, “Comparative Literature in America: Attempt at a Genealogy,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas
(London: Blackwell, ), .
Chapter 5
. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York, ), –.
. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –.
. Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, .
. Joanna Russ, “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband:
The Modern Gothic,” in The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann E. Fleenor (Montréal: Eden
Press, ), –, esp. –.
. See the eponymous cleaner of graves in Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality,
ed. Douglas Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –.
. Here I am borrowing Bourdieu’s model of class as a composite category, made
up of distinctions articulated and postures adopted within multiple interacting
“fields” (for instance, the field of culture, a subset of the larger field of social distinction). See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic
World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed.
Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –.
. A. S. Byatt, Possession (New York: Possession, ), .
. Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton (New York: Grove, ), .
. Byatt, Possession, –; Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Faber and Faber,
), .
. Ackroyd, Chatterton, .
. The most candid explorations of this anxiety have focused specifically on the
academy: for instance, Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, ). But by articulating the crisis as a conflict between market ideals and the ideal of culture, they imply (I think correctly) that similar conflicts are felt
by knowledge workers located outside of educational institutions.
. Johann Gottfried Herder, Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language,
and History, trans. Marcia Bunge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ),
.
Notes to Chapter 5
191
. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research
for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press,
), –.
. Readings, The University in Ruins, .
. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, vol.  of Works,  vols.
(London, ), x.
. Ibid., .
. Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), .
. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.,
), . Though Stoppard and Byatt also declare common cause with scientists, it is
possible to find some parallel-lives stories—such as Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (New
York: Harper, )—that employ an older strategy of pressing science into service as
historicist culture’s Other.
. Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, , .
. Stoppard, Arcadia, .
. For analogous gestures in recent historiography, see Ann Rigney, Imperfect
Histories: The Imperfect Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, ), –.
. David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, ), , –, . Simpson is quoting Stephen Green­
blatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), .
. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Culture (New York: Fawcett, ), –.
. John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), .
. Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, .
. For the broader history of this project, see Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations  (Winter ): –.
. Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in
Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, English-language ed.
Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol.  of  (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), .
. Werner Sollors, quoted in Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Mealley, introduction to History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and
Robert O’Mealley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . See also Klein, “On the
Emergence of Memory,” –.
. I have translated this passage from the French, because none of the existing
translations do full justice to the funereal overtones of the original text. Pierre Nora,
“Entre Mémoire et Histoire: La problématique des lieux,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire,
vol.  (Paris: Gallimard, ), , xxiv.
. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York: Routledge, ), .
192Notes to Chapters 5 and 6
. Nora, “General Introduction,” , , .
. Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory,” n. Klein credits this insight to
David A. Bell, “Realms of Memory,” New Republic, September , , –.
. Walter Benn Michaels, “‘You Who Never Was There’: Slavery and the New
Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust,” Narrative . (): . Ian Baucom,
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –.
. Jameson, Postmodernism, , , ix.
. Ibid., . Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen
E. Fields (New York: Free Press, ), –.
. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –.
. Ibid., .
. Jameson, Postmodernism, .
. Sally Shuttleworth, “Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel,” in The
Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor Shaffer (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), .
For an allied argument, see Dana Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian
Novel,” Studies in the Novel . (Winter ): –.
. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, ed. Frank
Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), .
. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
. Jameson, Postmodernism, , xi.
. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free
Press, ), xii.
. John Horgan, The End of Science (New York: Addison-Wesley, ), .
. P. B. Shelley, “Preface to Peter Bell the Third,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose:
Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. D. H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York:
W. W. Norton, ), .
. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?”
Washington Post, September , .
. Ackroyd, Chatterton, .
Chapter 6
. I am caricaturing Marjorie Levinson’s justly celebrated reading of “Tintern
Abbey” in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
), –.
. James Chandler, England in : The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of
Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ).
. It was incidentally excellent advice, for which I have always been grateful to
Walter Cohen.
Notes to Chapter 6
193
. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New
York: W. W. Norton, ).
. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead, ).
. William Galperin and Susan Wolfson, “The Romantic Century,” in Romantic
Circles, , http: //www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/crisis/crisisa.html.
. Jerome McGann, “Who’s Carving Up the Nineteenth Century,” PMLA .
(): –. Charles J. Rzepka, “The Feel of Not to Feel It,” PMLA . (): –
. Susan J. Wolfson, “Our Puny Boundaries: Why the Craving for Carving Up the
Nineteenth Century?” PMLA . (): –.
. See, for instance, the introduction to a special issue on periodization: Marshall
Brown, “Periods and Resistances,” MLQ . (): –.
. Kimberly Chabot Davis, “‘Postmodern Blackness’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
and the End of History,” Twentieth Century Literature . (): , –.
. Walter Benn Michaels, “‘You Who Never Was There’: Slavery and the New
Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust,” Narrative . (): .
. Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, ), –.
. Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” in Essential Works, 
vols., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), , –. Michel Foucault,
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works, vol. , ed. James D. Faubion (New
York: New Press, ), .
. Maureen McLane, “Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, –,” in This Is
Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
. Katie Trumpener, “Paratext and Genre System: A Response to Franco Moretti,” Critical Inquiry  (): .
. Franco Moretti, Maps, Graphs, Trees (London: Verso, ), .
. Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers, “The Emergence of Literary Diction,”
Journal of Digital Humanities . (), http: //journalofdigitalhumanities.org/-/theemergence-of-literary-diction-by-ted-underwood-and-jordan-sellers/. Constructing a
collection like this raises questions of representativeness to which there can be no final
answer. We tried to maximize diversity (both demographic diversity, and diversity of
subject and genre), while also choosing volumes that seemed to have reached a significant audience. It is also worth noting that we stripped prose introductions and notes
from volumes of poetry; otherwise we would be charting changes in the volume of
paratext that accompanied verse rather than changes in the diction of verse itself.
. Laly Bar-Ilan and Ruth A. Berman, “Developing Register Differentiation: The
Latinate-Germanic Divide in English,” Linguistics  (): –.
. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems,  vols. (London:
Longman, ), : xxiv.
. Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, A Quantitative Literary History of , Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method. Pamphlet . The Stanford
Literary Lab, May , http: //litlab.stanford.edu/?page_id=.
194Notes to Chapter 6
. Underwood and Sellers, “Emergence of Literary Diction.”
. For an example of an argument that I believe insists on too close a fusion
between quantitative and traditional methods, see Jeremy Rosen, “Combining Close
and Distant, or the Utility of Genre Analysis: A Response to Matthew Wilkens’s ‘Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers.’” Post , December , , http: //post.research.
yale.edu/archives/.
. See Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, “Discipline and Freedom,” in Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, ).
. Johanna Drucker, “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,” in Debates
in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), , .
. John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
. René Wellek, “Literary History,” in Literary Scholarship: Its Aims and Methods,
ed. Norman Foerster (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), .
Index
Aarslef, Hans, 87
Abbotsford, 44–45
Ackroyd, Peter, 138–41
Aestheticism, 10, 112, 143
Amnesia, 41–54, 149–50; caused by
electronic media, 149; middle-class,
101–2; postmodern, 150
Ancestral memory, 5, 22, 35–40, 137–41
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 155–56
Aristocracy, 7, 24, 33–34, 38–40, 43–48. See
also Landed property
Arnold, Matthew, 1, 81–82, 94, 99, 135
Athens, 76–78
Bloom, Harold, 13–14, 161
Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount,
69
Books of synonymy, 88–90
Boone, James Shergold, 72
Bourdieu, Pierre, 36, 99, 142
British Museum, 108
Brown Women Writers Project, 166
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 140
Burke, Edmund, 7, 27, 43, 49–50
Burnet, Thomas, 66
Butler, Marilyn, 24
Byatt, A. S., 14, 138–41, 143, 145–46
Babbitt, Irving, 119–20
Bacon, Alan, 97
Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 63
Baucom, Ian, 150
Bauman, Zygmunt, 19
Belles lettres, 82, 85
Berlin, Isaiah, 18
Bigland, John, 62
Birkerts, Sven, 147–48
Blackstone, William, 27, 43
Blair, Hugh, 85
Blindness, historical, 5, 17–23, 26, 46–51,
55. See also Amnesia; Perspective,
historical
Cambridge, 81, 105, 112
Capitalism, 14, 149
Carlyle, Thomas, 106, 108–10
Castles, 23–25. See also Landed
property
Catalog poem, historical, 64–70
Causality: historical, 6, 13–14; important
to literary history, 120; rejected as
unliterary, 129–30, 132, 161–62, 164. See
also Continuity, historical
Chandler, James, 158
Chiaromonte, Nicola, 17–18
Class, social, 6–7. See also Aristocracy,
Gentry, Landed property, Middle
195
196Index
classes, Professional class, Working
class
Clio, 63
Close reading, 165
Coke, Edward, 19–20, 25
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 88, 93, 121
Collective time, 8–11, 18–24, 27–54, 172
Colonialism, 31–33. See also Uneven
development
Columbia University, 113, 116–17
Comparative literature, 12, 115–23, 126,
131–32, 134–35
Composition, 91–93. See also Rhetoric
Comte, Auguste, 68
Continuity, historical, 11,13–14; and
change, 158–59; assumed to be
regressive, 162–63; growing confidence
in, 156; imaginary threats to, 153–54;
imagined to make literary study
scientific, 119–21; and landed property,
7, 27, 43–44; as a rationale for literary
study, 83–84. See also Development,
Discontinuity, Influence
Contrast, historical: defined, 3–5;
dominant in literary historicism,
134, 159–63; imagined as immortality,
65–70, 110–11, 146–51; loss of authority,
156, 157–59; middle-class affinities of,
7–8, 98–103; in parallel-lives plots,
35–40, 137–46; persistence, 12–14,
113–15; political implications, 11, 161–63;
shaped the period survey course,
95–103; transcends rank, 52–54; valid
uses of, 133, 163–64, 171
Corbett, Mary Jean, 39
Course catalogs, 2, 12, 91–105, 121–24
Court, Franklin, 82, 94, 97
Creasy, Edward, 104–5, 109–11, 113
Cultivation: aesthetic, 10, 112, 169;
historical, 4, 21–23, 51–52, 84, 140–49;
literary, 12; through periodization,
96–107, 112; transcends rank,
51–52. See also Culture, Distinction,
cultural
Culture: as immortality, 143; autonomy
from other forms of status, 8, 36–7,
51–52; concept of, 15, 22–23, 31–34;
declining prestige of, 140–42, 152;
distinguished from learning, 174;
national, 22–23, 31–34; transcends
continuity, 110–11, 152–53; transnational
dimension of, 78, 143
Cunningham, Michael, 137–38
Curriculum. See Literary study, Period
survey courses, Periodization
Dale, Thomas, 91–98
Darwin, Charles, 118
Davis, Kimberly Chabot, 162
Déjà vu, 5, 8, 22, 47–48, 108
DeQuincey, Thomas, 93
Development, historical: central to
literary study in the early nineteenth
century, 83–85, 95–98; displaced by
periodized contrast, 110–11; embattled
in the early twentieth century,
12–13, 116–20, 124–26, 132; presently of
marginal significance, 158–59, 162. See
also Continuity, historical
Diachronic concepts, 161–62
Diamond, Jared, 158
Diction, differentiation of, 166–69
Diderot, Denis, 66
Digital humanities: contribution
to historicism, 159–60, 164;
methodological diversity of, 159; why
controversial, 15–16, 164–66, 171–72. See
also Quantitative methods
Digital media, 15. See also Electronic
media
Disciplinarity, 12–13, 129–31, 161, 173–75
Discontinuity, historical, 11, 13–14; decline
of, 156; in literary study, 84–85. See also
Contrast, historical
Dispensationalism, 11
Distant reading, 16, 159, 165–66, 170. See
also Quantitative methods
Distinction, cultural: autonomy of, 7–8;
declining value of, 140–42; dependent
on historical contrast, 12, 30, 31–32,
68–69, 142; imagined to transcend
other forms of status, 35–36, 51–52, 78;
middle-class, 99–102
Distinction, social, 7–8, 22–23, 78
Index
Doctorow, E. L., 137
Drucker, Johanna, 171–72
DuMaurier, Daphne, 138–39
Duncan, Ian, 44
Durkheim, Emile, 9, 68, 110
Edgeworth, Maria, 32, 34
Electronic media, 145, 147, 149, 151
Eliot, George, 21, 50
Eliot, T. S., 153, 163
Ellis, Kate, 28
End of history, 14, 154–55, 157–58
English language and literature, 81–113.
See also Literary study
Enlightenment, 7, 18
Essentialism, 71. See also Universalism
Etymology, 91–95
Falconet, Etienne Maurice, 66
Feminism, 158, 160
Ferris, Ina, 18, 35
Foucault, Michel, 13, 133–34, 162–63
Fowles, John, 137–38, 144
Fragmentation, 14, 153, 159. See also
Discontinuity, historical
Fukuyama, Francis, 153–55, 158
Galperin, William, 160
Gellner, Ernest, 22, 31
Gentry, 7, 24, 34, 38–40, 43–48
Gothic novel, 23–31, 38–39, 138–39
Graff, Gerald, 1, 81, 128, 135
Great Britain, 3–4
Greenblatt, Stephen, 146
Guillory, John, 173
Guizot, François, 102–3, 106
Halleck, Reuben P., 13
Harvard University, 121–23
Harvey, David, 153, 156
Hazlitt, William, 67, 95–96
Hegel, G. W. F., 18, 154, 157
Hemans, Felicia, 65–70, 76, 101, 110
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 142
Historical novel, 5, 17–21, 23, 37–54, 103,
140, 152
Historicism, 3, 4–5, 7, 11–12, 23; both
197
acknowledges and transcends
particularity, 70, 79, 106, 143
Historiography, 5, 22, 55–64, 101–13
History: discipline of, 1–2, 6, 109–13; of
ideas, 115, 126; of science, 143; social
and cultural, 15, 22–23, 57, 76. See also
Literary history
Homer, 4
Howitts, William and Mary, 64–65
Hugo, Victor, 65
Humanities, 172–73
Hutcheon, Linda, 137
Huyssen, Andreas, 149
Imagination, 8, 69
Immortality: collective dimension of,
9–11, 67–69, 110; as consciousness of
historical change, 65–69, 107–9, 144–46;
and deep time, 147; in Foucault, 134; in
parallel-lives plots, 140–52; theology of,
6–7, 107–8. See also Ancestral memory,
Déjà vu, Reincarnation, Resurrection
India, literary study in, 81
Influence, literary, 13–14, 119–21, 125–26,
130, 132, 134, 161–63
Interdisciplinarity, 13, 171–72
Intertextuality, 161–62
Interventions, 164
Ireland, 30–40
Iser, Wolfgang, 18, 21
Jameson, Fredric, 137, 141, 150–53
Keats, John, 4, 8, 52, 66, 69–70
King’s College, London, 6–7, 91, 96–104,
106–12
Klein, Kerwin, 148, 150
Koselleck, Reinhart, 20
Landed property, 7, 18–21, 23–30, 38–39,
43–46, 48
Landscape, 27–30
Latham, R. G., 93–94, 111
Law, 19–20
Lee, Yoon Sun, 44
Literary diction, 167–68
Literary history: difficulty of writing,
198Index
128–30, 164; enduring preference for
contrast, 161–64; relation to criticism,
124–27; relation to rhetoric, 83–86;
René Wellek’s model of, 127–30; as a
science, 118–20, 124–25
Literary study, 1–2, 5–6, 81–135;
disciplinary autonomy of, 12–13,
129–31, 173–74; for the middle classes,
99–101; professionalization of, 123–24;
rationale for, 81–101, 174–75. See also
Literary history, Period survey courses,
Periodization
Literary theory, 1, 2, 113, 133–35; early
twentieth-century, 115, 118–19, 123
Lovejoy, A. O., 126–28, 132, 160–61, 163
Lukács, Georg, 17–18, 21
Lyotard, Jean-François, 153
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 76–80, 103
Mackenzie, Alastair, 118–19, 122
Macpherson, James, 9, 26, 33–34, 66–67
Malley, Shawn, 44
Marx, Karl, 17–18, 150–51, 158, 172, 174
Materialism, social, 15, 128
Maturin, C. R., 30
Maurice, Frederick Denison, 6–7, 85,
96–104, 106–12, 163
McKusick, James, 88
McLane, Maureen, 165
Memory: ancestral, 5, 22, 35–40, 137–41;
collective, 148–51; metaphor for history,
22, 35, 141, 143, 148–50
Michaels, Walter Benn, 150, 162–63
Middle classes, 6–9, 11, 19, 52–54, 58,
70, 73, 79–80, 85, 138–39; ideal of
independence, 54; need for historical
consciousness, 98–103
Mill, John Stuart, 68, 96
Millenialism, 11
Mitford, William, 76–77
Moretti, Franco, 159, 165–66
Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson), 30–42,
48–52
Morley, Henry, 112
Morrison, Toni, 162
Moulton, Richard, 115
Napoleonic wars, 42, 63
National tale, 23, 30–40
Nationalism, 6, 12, 50, 142; and the
concept of culture, 22–23, 31–32; in the
study of literature, 94–95, 99, 106–7
New Criticism, 115, 124, 134–35
New Historicism, 157–58
Nora, Pierre, 148–51
Norman Invasion, 167
Owenson, Sydney, 30–42, 48–52
Oxford, 81, 105, 112
Paine, Thomas, 88
Parallel lives, 14, 35–40, 136–56
Pater, Walter, 10, 143, 151, 163
Path dependency, 123
Period style, 84, 112, 150
Period survey courses: alternatives to,
84–85, 95–96, 121–24; analogy to
immortality, 107–11; class-conscious
rationale for, 97–103; in the discipline
of history, 103–5, 112–13; future of, 15,
171; origin of, 1–2, 6, 84–85, 95–113;
relation to specialization, 111
Periodization: challenges to, 12, 116–21,
158, 160–61; curricular origins of,
84–85, 95–113; disciplinary function
of, 126–33, 157, 171; durability of, 1–3,
12–14, 113–15, 136; future of, 15, 171; not
reducible to boundary-drawing, 3,
161; outside the university, 95–96, 158;
waning authority of, 15–16
Perspective, historical, 5, 26, 55–80, 84
Phillips, Mark Salber, 104
Philology, 2, 82–83, 86–87, 91–93, 114–15,
121
Pinter, Harold, 137–38
Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 63–64, 89
Posnett, H. M., 116–19, 122
Postmodernism, 14, 136–37, 162
Potkay, Adam, 68
Prestige. See Distinction, cultural;
Distinction, social
Priestley, Joseph, 58–62, 64, 72, 79
Professional class, 32, 53, 98–99
Progress, 10, 79, 95–96, 163–54
Index
Quantitative methods, 15–16, 159, 164–67,
170–75
Race, 94
Radcliffe, Ann, 18, 23–31; connection to
Lady Morgan, 34, 38–39; connection to
Walter Scott, 47–48, 54
Readings, Bill, 142
Realism, 5, 21, 42, 50–51, 137
Register, linguistic, 168
Reincarnation, 48, 120–21, 138–41. See also
Immortality
Resurrection, 65–66, 109–110, 139–46,
150–53. See also Immortality
Retrofuturism, 154
Rhetoric, 82–83, 85–96
Rogers, Henry, 82–83, 93
Romantic era, 21–22, 55–57, 64, 127, 160
Romanticism, 7, 126–28, 168–69
Rosenberg, Daniel, 59
Ross, Trevor, 7
Ruin sentiment, 45–46, 47–48
Saint-Simon, Henri, 158
Sand, George, 5, 140
Santayana, George, 119
Schmidgen, Wolfram, 7, 19–21, 27–28,
43–44
Schoch, Richard, 109
Scientism, 135, 164, 173
Scotland, 30, 44–46; literary study in, 81
Scott, Walter, 4, 6, 17–23, 40–54, 76, 102–4,
110
Secularization, 11
Sellers, Jordan, 166
Shaw, Harry, 41, 50
Shelley, P. B., 96, 155, 158
Shuttleworth, Sally, 152
Simpson, David, 146–47
Sloane, Barry, 37
Smith, Charlotte, 8
Smith, Olivia, 88
Source-study, 119–21, 124–26, 130, 132, 134.
See also Influence, literary
Specialization, 2, 84, 111
Spencer, Herbert, 118
199
Spengler, Oswald, 158
Spivak, Gayatri, 116
Stadial models, 158
Statistics, 172
Stendhal (Beyle, Marie-Henri), 17–18, 50
Stoppard, Tom, 138–44, 146
Surin, Kenneth, 135
Synchronic concepts, 161–62
Taylor, William, 89–90, 92, 94
Technostalgia, 154
Theology, 107–8. See Dispensationalism,
Immortality
Thierry, Augustin, 102–3
Timelines, 5, 58–62
Tolstoy, Leo, 5, 17–18, 50
Tooke, John Horne, 86–90, 93
Trumpener, Katie, 40–41, 165
Trusler, John, 88–89
Turning points, 166
Uncanny repetition, 36–38, 137–41, 146
Uneven development, 3
United States of America, 4, 73–76
Universalism, 71, 107, 117, 138, 143, 154–55
University College, London, 82–85, 90–99,
104, 109, 111–12
University of Chicago, 115–16, 120, 122
University of Illinois, 123
Warner, Michael, 123
Wellek, René, 13, 116, 126–32, 134, 160, 163,
171
Wells, H. G., 80
Welsh, Alexander, 43
Whiter, Walter, 88
Willard, Emma, 72–76, 101
Williams, Carolyn, 143
Williams, Raymond, 162
Wolfson, Susan, 160
Wordsworth, William, 5, 8, 68, 158,
168–69
Working class, 97
Yale University, 113
Young, Edward, 66