hume, robert. construction and legitimation in literary history

OPINION

CONSTRUCTION AND LEGITIMATION

IN LITERARY HISTORY

by robert d. hume

‘Literary history’ continues to be commonly practised even though it is widelyregarded with scepticism or contempt. This article examines approaches andassesses the options open to scholars. ‘Bottom up’ is an exploded positivist delu-sion, but lacking widely accepted historiographical principles ‘top down’ is not analternative. Practical problems in attempting to write literary history are (1) de¢ninga practicable aim; (2) justifying the process of selection that must be imposed;(3) determining principles of construction; and (4) establishing the basis on whichvalidity is claimed. What can a literary historian legitimately attempt to do?Documented contextual description and analysis is feasible. ‘Explanation’ ofchange is best attempted at the level of particular detail over relatively short spansof time. Only within the con¢nes of a very restricted subject can a historian attemptto be comprehensive. Literary history is often far from tidy, rational, or explicable.To pretend that it is these things is to falsify the past and to trivialize our subject.

buncombe, bunkum. n. [From Buncombe, a county of North Carolina.] Speechmakingto please constituents, or gain applause; anything said or done for mere show; hence,nonsense. (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary)

Literary history is pretty much bunkum. I say so not to align myself withHenry Ford (whose anti-historical prejudice I do not share) but rather to admitan unpalatable truth. Literary history of various sorts continues to be written(market-driven publishers ¢nd history saleable) and its underlying narrativeassumptions continue to have a potent in£uence on the ways in which we seethe past and on the structure of much of our university curriculum. In manycircles, however, it is looked on with open contempt, and this is not merely amatter of its being old hat and out of fashion. It has been practised with singularinattention to logic, rigorous methodology, or veri¢cation of claims. A great dealof historiographic theory has been written in the last hundred years, but verylittle of it is concerned with either speci¢cally literary history or with the nuts-and-bolts problems of validating the results.1 My object here is to address what

This article was delivered as the plenary talk at the MWASECS conference in Spring¢eld,Missouri, on 11 October 2002. For helpful critiques of a draft, I am indebted to EveTavorBannet, Clement Hawes, Kathryn Hume, Paulina Kewes, Ashley Marshall, Lori Molinari,Judith Milhous,Vidhya Swaminathan, and David J. Twombly.

1 For a sensible survey, see G. G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: FromScienti¢c Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH, 1997).

The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 56, No. 226� The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserveddoi:10.1093/res/hgi083

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seem to me the most fundamental practical problems in attempting to writeliterary history.These are: (1) de¢ning a practicable aim; (2) justifying the processof selection that must be imposed; (3) determining principles of construction; and (4)establishing the basis on which validity is claimed. A substantial book could bewritten on each of these topics, and a short and shamelessly jaunty article mayseem a frivolous way of addressing them. Sometimes, however, forests are bestcomprehended by getting out from among the trees.

Perhaps a short personal statement is in order. The reader may wonder whysomeone who £atly denied the intellectual viability of sequential ‘literary history’in Reconstructing Contexts (1999) should since then have written chapters forThe Cambridge History of English Literature2 and The Cambridge History of BritishTheatre3�and should now be proposing to enquire into the validation of ascholarly mode he has already condemned.My answer is, ¢rst, that literary historyis not going to go away; second, that if we are going to practise some form of it weshould try to do so well rather than badly; and third, that we may hope to dobetter by de¢ning more precisely what we claim to accomplish in writing varioussorts of literary history. I continue to take a gloomy view of ‘evolutionary history’.Not to be mysterious about my conclusions, I will say up front that I am lookingto position myself somewhere between traditional narrative history and thepostmodern critiques and alternatives that have emerged in the last thirtyyears�hoping to ¢nd practical ways to proceed that will produce artefacts subjectto responsible scholarly validation. I retract not a jot of what I published six yearsago, but I hope to o¡er some constructive suggestions along with some warningsand lamentations.4

I. De¢ning Aims

Literary History. 1. Any study of the language and historical contexts in which literaryworks were produced, and/or the lives of the authors. 2. The history of the succession ofliterary works, conventions, genres, or techniques, almost always including an explanationof temporal changes based on an implicit or explicit causal theory. . . .Only the seconddelineates a distinct scholarly activity.5

This de¢nition implicitly exalts sequential narrative at the expense of contextualreconstruction�a position with which I most emphatically do not agree. It o¡ers,however, a clear formulation of a traditional view of literary history that needs

2 Volume iii is The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660 1̂780, ed. J. Richetti(Cambridge, 2005).

3 Volume ii, 1660 1̂895, ed. J. Donohue (Cambridge, 2004).4 For a helpful collection of essays bearing on the subjects addressed here, seeM. Brown (ed.),The Uses of Literary History (Durham, NC, 1995). I have found the essays byLawrence Lipking, Jonathan Arac, Marjorie Perlo¡, and David Perkins particularly useful.

5 W. V. Harris, Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory (Westport, Conn.,1992), 185.

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to be confronted and discredited forthwith. Let me start by asking an obviousquestion.What is the object of this ‘distinct scholarly activity’? Note that WendellHarris identi¢es three crucial elements. These are (1) succession; (2) ‘literaryworks’ or their ‘conventions, genres, or techniques’ as the focal subject; and(3) causal explanation of the change described. If these are indeed all requisite,then we are immediately in hopeless di⁄culties. We can certainly treat newlywritten or published works in chronological order, and this convention hasgenerally been accepted without demur. But does this practice make any sense?Two novels published a few months or years apart do not necessarily have anydirect connection. The second may have been written in perfect ignorance of the¢rst. It may also have been profoundly in£uenced by books decades or centuriesold, and very possibly written in a foreign country. The evolutionary metaphorthat underlies a large majority of sequential histories (whether proudly pro-claimed or lurking as an unstated assumption) is in fact a dangerous piece ofnonsense. Books do not beget one another and they do not constitute a biologicalchain. As Rene¤ Wellek said late in his life about writing the history of criticism,‘A work of criticism is not simply a member of a series, a link in a chain. It maystand in relation to anything in the past. The critic may reach into the remotesthistory. An evolutionary history of criticism must fail.’6 One should admireWellekfor his honesty in stating this conclusion: he had spent most of his life champion-ing ‘literary history’ and writing a history of modern criticism.7 An evolutionaryhistory can certainly be concocted, whether of criticism, the novel, the sonnet, oranything else�but it will never stand up under rigorous scrutiny.8

The second issue is the ‘subject’ focused upon.We can ¢x our attention on newnovels, or plays actually staged in London, or whatever, but the personal, political,social, religious, and economic forces that a¡ect the production of any literarywork are to a considerable extent unknowable�and, where knowable, are oftenunmanageably complex and contradictory. But what right have we to separateliterary texts or their characteristics from the circumstances in which they areproduced? Yet to attempt to address all factors bearing on their productionwould be to write a history of the universe�not a very practicable enterprise.A radical process of selection is unavoidable, but how do we justify it?

The third issue is causal explanation. Can we, in truth, produce causal expla-nations for sequential change in literary works? Well, of course we can. But willthese explanations seem convincing to anyone who does not already subscribe tothe principles used in generating them? Proof of causation is a fearfully vexed

6 R.Wellek,The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), 143^4.

7 A History of Modern Criticism, 1750 1̂950, 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1955^92).8 An obvious reason for the decline of evolutionary history is loss of faith in direct ‘in£u-ence’, a concept that has largely given way to ‘intertextuality’ in all but the most pedestrianforms of criticism. Intertextuality, however, is more a reader- than an author-function. Onthese issues, see J. Clayton and E. Rothstein (edd.), In£uence and Intertextuality in LiteraryHistory (Madison,Wis., 1991), esp. ch. 1 by the editors.

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matter in both philosophical theory and historical practice. Given the enormousnumber of personal, social, political, economic, racial, religious, gender (etc. etc.)factors that a¡ect the production of any literary work, can we really claim to beable to say why it came out as it did? Derrida’s rejection of the quest for ‘origins’ isno doubt extreme, but it has practical virtues. Even if we had access to exhaustiverecords of the personal and contextual conditions of the work’s production(which we lack for most pre-nineteenth-century writing), could we claim withcon¢dence to understand the generative forces that produced it? And if so,would other investigators weighing the same evidence arrive at something likethe same conclusions? If not, then we have not a serious historical conclusion buta hypothesis not readily subject to any process of veri¢cation. If the hypothesisseems sensible, attractive, even beautiful to a lot of people then it may be widelyaccepted�but let us remember that a lot of people believed for a very long timethat the world was £at.

A methodologically defensible concept of evolutionary history requires thattwo basic conditions be met. (1) The material that constitutes our subject mustbe connected. That is, the elements must have a demonstrable relationship withone another. (2) The material must be su⁄ciently independent of the rest of itscontext that it can be legitimately abstracted and studied by itself.These demandscan be reasonably well met within narrow bounds. The poems, plays, and essaysof John Dryden are connected by virtue of his having written them, and while heis a very topical and historically situated writer, we may legitimately isolate hiswork as an evolving corpus�preferably with considerable attention to currentevents and supplying comparisons with the work of contemporaries. An evolu-tionary history can plausibly be written of an institution (Drury Lane under thetriumvirate management, 1709^32, or the publishing ¢rm of Longman). A popularnew genre can be followed for a decade or two (the ballad opera, 1728^37). Butwhere the subject-matter lacks genuine cohesion or it cannot be abstracted andstudied in something like isolation, then we are probably deluding ourselves orindulging in special pleading of the sort that satis¢es only true believers.

Writing about systems of ‘literary classi¢cation’ in 1991 David Perkins notedthat he was attempting merely ‘to describe what have been and still are thecommon methods’, disavowing any ‘attempt to suggest what ought to be done ifwe are to overcome our clearly unsatisfactory practices’.9 Perkins opened Is LiteraryHistory Possible? by stating two ‘fundamental problems’: ¢rst, ‘the insurmountablecontradictions in organizing, structuring, and presenting the subject’, and second,‘the always unsuccessful attempt of every literary history to explain the develop-ment of literature that it describes’.10 Writing his own A History of Modern Poetry(1976) left him ‘unconvinced (or deconvinced)’ that defensible literary history can

9 D. Perkins,‘Literary Classi¢cations: How HaveThey Been Made?’, in id. (ed.),TheoreticalIssues in Literary History, Harvard English Studies 16 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 248^67: 253.

10 Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore, Md., 1992), p. ix.


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be written (p. 11). If ‘literary history’ must consist of sequential survey withcausal explanation, then in my view Perkins’s case is virtually irrefutable.11 Butcan we perhaps rede¢ne our enterprise in ways that would yield more limited butdefensible results?

Let us back up and start over again. If ‘literary history’ is to be written thenlet us ask what it is to do for whom. Until the last couple of decades, mostbooks published as literary histories were terrifyingly untheorized. Being highlytheorized is, to be sure, no guarantee of sanity, let alone satisfactory practice, buta writer may reasonably be asked to state what he or she hopes to accomplish.Looking at a number of recent ‘histories’, I deduce at least ¢ve sorts of impliedreaders. These are: the undergraduate student; the postgraduate student;the ‘general reader’; the non-specialist professional scholar; the professionalspecialist. The needs of these groups are radically di¡erent. The undergraduatetraversing unfamiliar territory for the ¢rst time probably wants general orienta-tion from a relatively simpli¢ed roadmap. So perhaps does the general reader,if such a creature is still buying literary histories. What professional scholarswant (whether apprentice or authority-in- ¢eld) will vary quite a lot, but is muchlikelier to involve particulars and technical detail than Big Picture orientation.As a working hypothesis, perhaps we should assume that the more specializedthe audience the more cautious our claims should be�and conversely thatalmost any conveniently memorable lies will do for undergraduate students andgeneral readers.

Must we claim to understand causes? A fundamental question for anyoneproposing to write history of any sort is whether it is to be descriptive or explana-tory in nature. To say ‘what happened’ is one thing; to say ‘why it happened’ issomething very di¡erent. Likewise in the literary realm one may say what waswritten and what it was like, but to claim to say why change occurred (howevermanifest the change) is essentially another enterprise. Is the solution to literaryhistory’s woes simply to abandon narrative as a bad job (and causation with it),and retreat into the safer realms of ‘the encyclopedia’? The attractions ofencyclopedic form are rightly granted by David Perkins. Such a history mayconsist of many essentially disjunct chapters written by specialists, with noattempt to impose coherence (or even perhaps consistency). There is no ‘bigstory’. The form is liberatingly free of constraints: one may do virtually anything.And yet, as Perkins complains, ‘Encyclopedic form is intellectually de¢cient.Its explanations . . . are piecemeal, may be inconsistent with each other, and areadmitted to be inadequate. It precludes a vision of its subject.’12 We get not apicture of an elephant, but six (or perhaps sixty) myopic and disjunct descriptionsof bits of the elephant. Literary history, to be sure, tends to be more complicated

11 For my own deeply sceptical views on the intellectual legitimacy of separatistevolutionary literary history, see Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles ofArchaeo-Historicism (Oxford, 1999), 102^16.

12 Is Literary History Possible?, ch. 3, esp. pp. 53, 54, 60.

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than elephants.We are on the horns of a very bothersome dilemma. Satisfactoryexplanation is held to be impossible, but without such elements as the presump-tion of coherence, tracing of meaningful continuity, and some accountingfor change, literary history seems empty, undirected, and unsatisfying. Better,perhaps, a pleasant delusion than the horrors of chaos and uncertainty. Onesees why Big, Tidy, Coherent, and Satisfying seem nicer than the alternative�but is real life like that? Is the chaotic reality of tens of thousands of particularworks at all likely to reduce conveniently to neat categories and transitions?Obviously not. No one rang a bell in 1485 (or whatever other date) to announcethat the medieval period was being shut down and would be replaced by (oh joy)the Renaissance�or, as we now say, the early modern period, an even vaguer andmore useless label. Almost all sequential literary history is heavily coloured withthe terms and assumptions of period characterizations.

Periodization is now widely understood to be nonsense, but it is not exactlybeing abandoned.13 Virtually all college and university teachers have been deeplysteeped in it; textbooks may decry it but almost always use it; the language ofperiod characterizations is built into most criticism and scholarship of the last140 years. The objections are devastating. The production of literature is essen-tially continuous; it rarely exhibits exact beginnings or endings. If we assume thatliterary works mirror their age then we tend to take the composite conception ofthe age and use it as a decidedly reductive tool for reading particular works thatmay in fact exist in no tidy relationship to our generality, whether exemplifying itor resisting it. Periodization is convenient in the debased coin of textbooks andfor memorizing ‘potted’ history. It does little but pervert our understandingof historical actuality or the particulars of individual works. Yet most scholarsdefend it as a necessary evil, however shamefacedly. Things would be awfullyconfusing if we tried to cope with reality instead of comforting fairy tales. Wesound like a bunch of Victorian theists twittering unhappily about the horrorsinto which Darwinian theory might plunge us. If literary history is ever to be ofany real help in understanding particular works, it will have to abandon grotesqueconceptual falsi¢cations�of which the ‘period’ is one of the worst. Of periods,more in due course.

Let us return to the issue of what we are trying to do for whom. Severaluntidily interconnected enterprises are common in various sorts of literaryhistory as practised in the recent past and present. For analytical purposes, wemay examine them separately. First, at the most basic level of survey, there are‘annals’. These may consist simply of lists of works written or published, but innarrative form at least some attempt at categorization and description is to beexpected. Annals give one little beyond date and surrounding-title context, and

13 For seriously damaging critiques of the use of periodization in literary history, seeE. Rothstein, ‘ ‘‘Organicism’’, Rupturalism, and Ism-ism’, Modern Philology, 85 (1988),588^609, and T. Postlewait, ‘The Criteria for Periodization in Theatre History’, TheatreJournal, 40 (1988), 299^318.


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they are (short of the ESTC) almost inevitably selective, often to a truly radicaldegree.14 All too often, the principles of selection are not made explicit. Withinthe limits of their claims, annals can be exceedingly useful, as witness the Annals ofEnglish Drama, 975 1̂700�an attempt at an exhaustive list of play titles, specifying(so far as known) authorship, date, auspices, generic type, and ¢rst publication.15

Some of the dates and attributions have been proved wrong over the years(thus improving later editions) and some of the generic designations may bechallenged, even when they come from title pages. A large part of the work’svalue lies in its total inclusiveness. It gives us, of course, merely a list of allknown English plays over a period of more than seven centuries (includingLatin plays and lost plays), providing the basis for an attempt at analytical historyand conclusions, but o¡ering no such thing itself.

A second enterprise I shall call characterization. If we go beyond title andgeneric label (however arrived at) then some attempt to describe the works coveredis more or less mandatory. Unless radical limits are imposed in terms of durationor nature of items included, a high degree of selectivity is inevitable. Some 1,500new plays (mainpieces and afterpieces) were performed in London during theeighteenth century: to supply even a very brief and cursory description of eachwould require a substantial book. Surely not all works deserve the same amountof space, but how do we decide what gets emphasized, what scanted, and whateliminated altogether? ‘Importance’ is the usual criterion, but important towhom? Consider a case in mid-seventeenth-century poetry. In 1665 Miltonseemed an obscure and insigni¢cant writer. Even in 1675 after the appearance ofhis epics he seemed of no great stature except to a few cognoscenti. But by1725 hehad become one of the titans of English literature. Do we mean important thenor important now? At the time of Milton’s death few people would have rankedhim with Cowley, Denham, or Waller. Even once we have settled inclusion andprominence, the terms of characterization are troublesome. Theirs or ours?Characterization is hard to provide in value-neutral terms. Wycherley’s ThePlain-Dealer was extravagantly admired as a satire in its day, but today its reward-ing a vicious would-be rapist in the happy ending seems far from appetising. Oneof the functions of literary history is no doubt to tell us what is to be found outthere, but what constitutes a legitimate thumbnail sketch may be hotly debated.

A major part of the reason for this controversiality are di⁄culties attaching tothe third enterprise, which is evaluation. Judgement of quality and signi¢cance ofachievement are customarily criteria in the process of selection, but most literaryhistorians have felt obligated to deliver explicit verdicts on what they survey.The literary stock market is such that the judgements of one generation canlook very peculiar indeed to another. Think of Donne and Blake. Those whosold Goldsmith stock a generation ago were prescient.Who could have imagined

14 See e.g. M. Cox (ed.),The Oxford Chronology of English Literature (Oxford, 2002).15 Originally compiled and published by Alfred Harbage in 1940; 2nd edn., revisedS. Schoenbaum 1964; 3rd edn., revised S. Stoler Wagonheim, London, 1989.

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in 1970 that Aphra Behn would soar? Might Thomas Southerne now be worthbuying into as a long-term speculation? A survey without qualitative assessmentseems hollow, but assessment on what basis? Lifetime reputation can prove wildlymisleading; our own fads and fancies will prove equally evanescent. Unless one isF. R. Leavis, one might hesitate to pronounce for the ages.The preface to the ¢rstedition of the ‘Spiller’ Literary History of the United States (1947) said cheerily that‘Each generation should produce at least one literary history of the United States,for each generation must de¢ne the past in its own terms.’16 Fair enough up toa point, but how do we avoid simply reading the fads du jour onto the past?Is history not to represent its subject-matter with some accuracy and respect forthe past? Where do we draw the line? And is a historical survey the best placefor rendering qualitative judgements?

A fourth part of the enterprise is contextualization. Even at the height of NewCriticism, most critics agreed that original meaning was very much a function ofthe circumstances of composition and reception. One might try to read Absalomand Achitophel without reference to its author, date, political circumstances, andpersonal allusions, but the results would be ludicrous. Contexts are, however,constructed by the historian: one cannot appeal to the actuality in which writerswrote and readers read. If people can seriously debate the politics of Swift orSamuel Johnson in the twenty- ¢rst century, then we cannot be too cocksure ofour ability to judge the factors that a¡ected the generative circumstances ofeven the work of such long-studied major writers. A literary history can usefullypoint to parallels, oppositions, and similar works at much the same time. It canrefer us to wars and revolutions and political crises and religious broils. Butexactly how these things a¡ected the writing of particular poems, plays, andnovels is often highly debatable. In the limited space available in a literary historysurvey, the author will be able to do little more than report current scholarlyconsensus, if any.

A ¢fth enterprise is causal explanation of sequential change. The implausibility ofthis enterprise is manifest and so is our stubborn insistence upon pursuing achimera. Fanatical determination to make something work may not, of course,derive from any rational source. Quite a lot of alchemical folk were ¢rmlyconvinced that they were only a hairsbreadth away from transmuting lead intogold. The desire to understand ‘why’ something happened is easy to sympathizewith. The results to date on any but very limited kinds of problems, however,suggest that�as historians as di¡erent as Jacques Le Go¡ (of the Annales school)and David Hackett Fischer long ago argued�we will do well to understand that‘history-writing is not story-telling but problem solving’.17 Legitimate historical

16 R. E. Spiller et al. (edd.), Literary History of the United States, 3rd edn. (New York, 1963),p. vii.

17 J. Le Go¡, History and Memory, trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman (New York, 1992), 201;D. H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970),quotation at p. xii.


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scholarship poses questions that are potentially answerable with factual evidence.We may sometimes have evidence of a sort that permits plausible conjecturesabout causation, but two caveats are in order. First, the more complex the issue,the less likely we are to address causal issues successfully. Second, the requisiteevidence is likelier to exist in su⁄cient quantity for recent matters than for thosea couple of centuries back or more.

A sixth enterprise requires at least a brief objection�polemical commitment. Awriter may undertake to work from the principles and values of (say) neo-Marxistcriticism or American patriotism or psychology of any kind from Freud or Jung toLacan and beyond. One could write A Christian History of British Literature. Mostacademics these days would ¢nd the Christian History preposterous, but this isall a matter of point of view. A great many British authors were indubitablyChristians, and Christianity will have a¡ected them in all sorts of ways. Thewriter of this history might be inclined to indulge in some personal tweaking ofevaluations, but then so might a Marxist critic, or a Scottish nationalist�or ahardline atheist or feminist. The issue is whether one is attempting to representthe past largely as it was understood at the time by various constituencies (withsome bene¢ts of hindsight) or whether one is utilizing the past in the service of apresent-day agenda. I need to confess my own biases here. As a Quaker paci¢stbitterly opposed to the Vietnam war in my formative years I ¢nd myself inclinedto sympathize with the political activism found in some cultural materialist andnew historicist scholarship. My own sympathies and prejudices aside, however,I must agree with Fischer that ‘To make historiography into a vehicle forpropaganda is simply to destroy it’.18

What, then, is a legitimate ‘aim’? Annals we can produce. Characterization,evaluation, and contextualization are all feasible, if problematical in a variety ofways. Causal explanation is a perpetual temptation but rarely convincing beyondvery limited kinds of problems. Commitment to a theoretical basis turnsintellectual investigation into mere production of exempla.We shall be exploringsome practical problems in the next three sections, but perhaps a more generalcomment is in order here. A truly worthy history, if such a thing can be written,needs to communicate the heterogeneous outlooks and experiences of writers and readers atthe time. Whether this can be done e¡ectively via broad-focus sequential historyI am inclined to doubt. A more plausible alternative seems to me somethinglike Lyotard’s overlapping ‘little histories’. But whatever kind of history we write,it needs to convey the excitement and fascination of grappling with remote andoften puzzling material.The reader needs to feel how exhilarating, problematical,and contentious is the process of reading historical literature. To survey olderliterature with the bland conviction that we may read it, pigeonhole it, andjudge it with the assurance of a comfortable superiority is not to write literaryhistory but literary autopsy.

18 Historians’ Fallacies, 314.

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II. The Problems of Selectivity

The kinds of selectivity necessary to the construction of a literary history ofreasonable size are more numerous, complex, and treacherous than one mightsuppose. There is nothing simple, separate, or necessarily true about the ‘facts’one uses, let alone one’s valuation of them. Economic, social, and generic analysiswill use very di¡erent ¢lters to pull up what they privilege�a point made morethan two generations ago by Herbert Butter¢eld, and elegantly re¢ned by recenthistoriographers such as Michel de Certeau.19 Most of us will readily agree withthe theory, but the damage su¡ered in the course of actual practice is worthclose inspection. In writing a chapter on the plays of the period from roughly1730 to 1790 for the new Cambridge History of English Literature, I was aware of atleast seven major types of selection that I had to exercise, and with that essay asa principal example I shall lay them out brie£y for the reader’s consideration.

1. Partial coverage of the subject. In the period at issue roughly 900 new playswere professionally produced in London. I was allotted thirty typescript pages.How best to use them? I could not even have listed title-author-date for each ina single line without running to more like forty pages. At 300 pages I couldhave devoted an average of a third of a page to each title, but the sterility of sucha limitation is all too obvious in Allardyce Nicoll’sHistory.20 I managed to mentionsome eighty- ¢ve of the plays (and about twenty older ones for comparison), mostof them in one sentence or even less. Much of the ‘characterization’ was donewith reference to playwrights rather than particular titles. I could have picked¢ve presumptively ‘representative’ titles and given them about four pages each,thereby conveying a much better grasp of a very tiny sample of the whole�buthow legitimate would that sample be?

2. False exclusion. To present a survey of new plays direly misrepresents whataudiences saw in the theatre. Roughly 85 per cent of the performances inLondon in the period at issue were of old plays, many of them several decadesold or more. A high proportion of the new plays were never revived after theirinitial run and probably had very minimal in£uence on subsequent new plays.What aspirant and professional playwrights saw night after night at CoventGarden and Drury Lane were mostly classics and updatings of classics, and thecontribution of these works to writers’ sense of what the actors could do musthave been enormous. Stock plays probably had far more in£uence than recentlypremie' red ones. We need to ask what properly falls under the heading of ‘new’.Many years ago, in a survey of late seventeenth-century drama, I devoted only acasual sentence or two to Buckingham’s 1664 revision of Fletcher’s The Chances.My reasoning was that it was merely an adaptation. I was extremely stupid about

19 H. Butter¢eld, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), ch. 2; M. de Certeau,The Writing of History, trans.T. Conley (New York, 1988), chs. 1 and 2.

20 A History of English Drama, 1660-1900, rev. edn., 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1952^9).


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the play. Quite aside from its artistic merit (which is considerable), it remaineda stock piece right into the nineteenth century, serving as a vehicle for RobertWilks, David Garrick, and other stars. Garrick revamped the text at least twicein major ways, and others after him did so too.The stage history of The Chances isalmost a chronicle in miniature of the evolving taste of the London audience overa period of a century and a half. But if being a ‘mere adaptation’ automaticallyexcludes a play from consideration, then we are seriously distorting the repertoryas it was seen by its original audiences. I now realize that the play was an impor-tant and extremely early contribution to the ‘gay couple’ tradition, and it musthave been vastly more in£uential on later generations of playwrights than a lot ofother plays which have received far more critical attention.

Works are often devalued or expunged from the canon because of valuejudgements. The 1674 ‘operatic’ version of The Tempest (by Dryden, Davenant,and probably Shadwell) is a telling case in point. However disgusted the present-day critic may feel by what most have considered a travesty of Shakespeare, thework may have been the most popular ‘new’ play of its period. It had enormousin£uence on the musical tradition in the English theatre, and a responsiblehistorian must try to take it seriously. False exclusion of another sort occurswhen the critic’s intellectual matrix obliterates evidence that does not ¢t it.Laura Brown’s intelligent and wide-ranging generic survey of English dramaafter 1660 does not so much as mention John Gay orThe Beggar’s Opera, althoughthat workwas among the most popular plays of the eighteenth century; it was oneof the most radically innovative in generic terms; and it initiated a major boomin ballad opera that helped change the whole direction of the London theatre.21

It did not, however, ¢t the critic’s categories, and that consigned the play tooblivion.

3. Imposition of arti¢cial beginning and ending dates. Selection occurs by truncationas well as by exclusion. History is not a simple continuum, and some events helplegitimate choices for starting and stopping points. The virtual hiatus in publicperformances in London between 1642 and 1660, the patent monopoly grantedby Charles II, and the introduction of changeable scenery make 1660 a good pointat which to start a drama-theatre history.22 The fabulous success of The Beggar’sOpera makes 1728 a pivotal date; 1737 is another because of the Licensing Act.The construction of the enormous new versions of Covent Garden and DruryLane in the 1790s contributed to generic change. In truth, however, there is noevent or date that can legitimately be taken as a starting or ending point. Evenin 1660 there is a high degree of continuity�in play types, theatrical practice,repertory, and personnel.The returning members of the King’s Company who set

21 L. Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660 1̂760: An Essay in Generic History (New Haven,Conn., 1981).

22 One must beware, however, of assuming more radical disjunction than there actuallywas. Alfred Harbage long ago proved that there is no essential discontinuity in dramaticgenres between 1626 and 1669. See Cavalier Drama (New York, 1936).

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up shop again in the autumn of 1660 regarded themselves as members of thesame organization they had joined in the 1620s and 1630s.23 All historians cannotbe asked to begin with the creation of the world and end with the present, butaccepting conventional boundary dates grossly falsi¢es the experience of thosewho lived, wrote, and read at the time.The ‘Romantic period’ that started in 1798(according to anthology-think) was not recognized at the time, had virtuallynothing to do with drama, and was conceived ex post facto a full generation afterit allegedly came to an end. Whether we will ever escape the con¢nes of thisconceptual monstrosity I am inclined to doubt. The starting and ending pointsfor a history limited in chronological span need to be understood as largelyarbitrary choices.

4. Construction of limited contexts of manageable size. Most eighteenth-centuryEnglish plays were written with particular companies and performers in view.They were conceived for the changeable-scenery staging featured at CoventGarden and Drury Lane. A great many were explicitly designed as star vehicles.The title I devised for my Cambridge History of English Literature essay was‘Drama and Theatre in the Mid- and Later Eighteenth Century’, a title intendedto signal my determination to describe and analyse the plays not simply as textsbut as performance vehicles contrived for use in a particular theatrical settingthat exerted potent in£uence on the construction of plays. In this respect I wasexpanding my focus beyond new-texts-in-sequence, but in others I imposedsevere limitations. I did not, for example, make any attempt to consider paralleldevelopments in the novel, or in£uence of ¢ction on drama, even in the case ofwriters who worked in both forms (e.g. Goldsmith, Holcroft). I ignored Gothicismand the picturesque. I ignored the social and political issues that become soprominent in the 1790s. I totally disregarded the importance of dance in thetheatres’ o¡erings, though for many years Covent Garden devoted as much as25 per cent of its performer budget to dance.24 This list could be extended. Eachexclusion is an oversimpli¢cation and a falsi¢cation�but how much will ¢t intothirty pages, or even 300?

5. Value judgements as applied to individual plays. Assuming that 90 per cent ormore of the plays will be ignored, what is the principle of selection to be?Looking at the late seventeenth century, for example, we ¢nd that eleven playsby Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve have received a staggering proportion ofmodern critical attention, the bulk of it actually lavished on just three titles�TheCountry-Wife,The Man of Mode, and TheWay of the World. All three were ultimatelysuccessful stock plays. But from the vantage point of original writers and theatre-goers, we should be looking at such immensely popular plays as Sir MartinMar-all, The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman, A Fond Husband, The London Cuckolds, and

23 See J. Milhous and R. D. Hume, ‘New Light on English Acting Companies in 1646,1648, and 1660’, RES NS 42 (1991), 487^509.

24 See J. Milhous, ‘The Economics of Theatrical Dance in Eighteenth-Century London’,Theatre Journal, 55 (2003), 481^507.


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The Emperor of the Moon. Recent critics have regarded Southerne’sTheWives Excuseas one of the greatest plays of its time, but it died in one night in 1691 and wasnever revived. Is the historian to privilege what was successful and/or in£uentialin its own day? Or what we now regard as the best work of its time? One may doeither or a bit of both, but in any case the results are arti¢cially skewed.

6.Value judgements as applied to genres. The hugely successful and pro¢table playsof the late seventeenth century were mostly comedies or tragedies belonging torespected generic types. This is much less true between 1720 and 1800. Survivingaccount books prove conclusively that what really coined money was pantomimes,afterpiece farces, and (from the 1760s on) musicals of various sorts. Twentieth-century commentators, however, almost unanimously regarded such works withcondescension or outright contempt, and aside from a bit of incidental abusethey have received little attention from either critics or literary historians.Judged by present-day values, most such works are thin, trivial, super¢cial�commercial trash. They were, however, exactly what brought a large proportionof the eighteenth-century audience to the theatre, and to ignore them is severelyto falsify the actual nature of what was then written and enjoyed.

7. Disregarding or minimizing non-English sources and in£uences. A very largenumber of ‘English’ plays were translations or adaptations of Continental playsor prose ¢ction. A great many English playwrights read French £uently, anda surprising number could and did read Italian, Spanish, and German. Lookingat mid-eighteenth-century literary magazines, one quickly realizes how manytranslations were being published and just how multi-national the high cultureof the time really was. Despite all this glaringly obvious in£uence, critical atten-tion has been minimal. Corneille has been cited as a signi¢cant in£uence onDryden’s heroic plays, and a tiny bit of work has been done on the impact ofMolie' re (most of it pedestrian and more than half a century old).The importanceof Voltaire goes almost unmentioned. That Kotzebue was a major source forElizabeth Inchbald was well known in her lifetime but has provoked littlescholarly interest in the last hundred years. Drama historians are not alone inthis insularity. With few exceptions, historians of the novel have systematicallyneglected mid-eighteenth-century Continental sources, in£uences, and parallels.The classics have likewise been grossly minimized in accounts of most authorsand genres. (Pope is an obvious exception.) Most English playwrights must havehad some knowledge of classical plays, but one would rarely guess this in readingrecent criticism.

The sorry truth is that we turn a blind eye to what is di⁄cult or inconvenientor too large to cope with comfortably. In so doing, we are guilty of producing whatJ. H. Hexter has called ‘tunnel history’, in which history is split up ‘into a series oftunnels, each continuous from the remote past to the present, but practicallyself-contained at every point and sealed o¡ from contact with or contaminationby anything that was going on in any of the other tunnels. At their entrancesthese tunnels bear signs saying diplomatic history, political history, institutionalhistory, ecclesiastical history, intellectual history,militaryhistory, economic history,

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legal history, administrative history, art history, colonial history, social history,agricultural history, and so on, and so on.’25

This is exactly what we have done in splitting literary history o¡ fromdiplomatic, political, intellectual (etc.) history.Worse, we have further subdividedour own territory, creating separatist tunnels for various genres and nationalliteratures. The result is wonderfully convenient garden plots of manageablesize�and a woefully limited, arti¢cial (one might say falsi¢ed) picture of oursubject-matter. Not all parallel tunnels are relevant all the time: the connectionof agricultural history to literary history is mostly fairly tenuous, though thesocial changes to which agricultural history contributed have both direct impacton the content of eighteenth-century poetry and more general impact onsocial changes that have enormous in£uence on the literature of the industrialrevolution. The di⁄culty of organizing and controlling all signi¢cantly relevantterritories, however, is probably insurmountable, especially over any signi¢cantspan of time. One might in a substantial book deal passably well with a greatvariety of historical and cultural factors over the course of a decade in a study of‘literary history’, but that is probably about the outside limit.

III. Principles of Construction

Like history more generally, all literary history is an ex post facto constructionconceived and executed by the historian. The literary historian is unusuallyfortunate in dealing principally with ‘the real thing’ (poems, plays, novels) ratherthan with secondary records of otherwise unrecoverable events.The fact remainsthat what we build is essentially a picture, and one whose faithfulness to pastactuality is far from easy to determine. A literary historian starts the process ofconstruction by deciding what to privilege and what to exclude�a decision thatmay be elaborately rationalized or virtually unthinking, explicitly announced ornot. One must then decide what organizing scheme to adopt. Studying historicalworks in their contexts is a very di¡erent proposition from surveying works inchronological succession�and ‘literary history’ as commonly understood prettymuch requires the latter. What, then, is to provide a coherent conceptual struc-ture for our narrative? The writer must have some sort of de¢nition that delimitsthe territory to be covered and principles of organization that will generate achapter outline. A very large number of conceptual and methodological errorsmay lead to unsound results, but for purposes of sketching the basic problemsI will content myself with outlining six fallacies (so denominated in honour ofDavid Hackett Fischer) each of which inevitably leads to catastrophe.

1. The fallacy of simple characterization. Almost any blanket characterizationof a complex subject will produce delectably tidy oversimpli¢cations. ‘Ageof . . .Anything’ is an intellectual abomination that we will do well to eschew.I well remember the consternation of my teachers a generation ago when

25 Reappraisals in History (Evanston, Ill., 1961), 194.


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respected senior scholars challenged the conceptual validity of the ‘Age ofNeoclassicism’ and the ‘Age of Reason’.26 The enormous (and continuing)investment of learned scholars in de¢nitions of the ‘Augustan Age’ is painful tocontemplate. Most scholars now deride courses with titles like ‘The Age of Pope’and ‘The Age of Johnson’, but plenty of them are still taught. A journal calledThe Age of Johnson was founded as recently as 1988 and continues to be publishedunder that title.‘Age of ’ thinking is far from dead. Croce said long ago that perioddesignations are merely conventional and have no real basis in the actuality oftheir times, but this sunny indi¡erence to chaos has been ¢ercely resisted forthe better part of a century. Neat labels give one a wonderful sense of clarityand security. The labels may in fact be utter nonsense, but their persistence isundeniable. As an undergraduate in the 1960s I was taught as fact that in the Ageof Reason rational structure was everywhere to be found�despite the fact thatA Tale of a Tub was on our syllabus and that Donald Greene had blown theidea to bits back in 1952.27 Uniformitarian period characterizations cannot beanything but nonsense for two good reasons. First, periodization is about assound as Ptolemaic astronomy. Second, there has been no year in the past 500 inwhich the outlook and output of writers were anything remotely like unvaryinglyuniform.The idea of uniformity across a period of decades is convenient but toosilly even to be worth attacking.Geistesgeschichte is one of those Grand Ideas whichseem to o¡er boundless possibilities until one gets into the nitty-gritty businessof trying to reconcile or explain away the endless contradictions in particularsthat reality presents us�if we are willing to open our eyes to them and refuseto overlook inconvenient evidence.

2. The fallacy of dialectical characterization. For those su⁄ciently attuned to theparticular to be willing to concede that Dryden and Bunyan are not the samewriter, Simple Characterization can be abandoned in favour of DialecticalCharacterization. For anyone dealing in period concepts, the contrast creates asatisfying story of change. The bad old Middle Ages give way to the Renaissance.Neoclassicism is superseded by Romanticism. Narratives of decline have theirown satisfactions: Romanticism gives way to Victorianism (but happily is followedby Modernism). Within single periods one may enjoy the convenience of tidycontrasts.Whig versusTory is a good one (employed by many a scholar in appar-ent ignorance of the complexity of Swift’s politics). Douglas Bush’s in£uentialEnglish Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600 1̂660 (1945; volume v ofthe Oxford History of English Literature) used a dichotomy as a central conceptual

26 See B. H. Bronson, ‘When Was Neoclassicism?’, in H. Anderson and J. S. Shea(edd.), Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics 1660 1̂800: Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk(Minneapolis, Minn., 1967), 13^35, and G. Boas, ‘In Search of the Age of Reason’, inE. R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, Md., 1965), 1^19.Bronson’s essay in particular is a classic.

27 D. J. Greene,‘ ‘‘Logical Structure’’ in Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, Philological Quarterly,31 (1952), 315^36.

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device (Christian^humanist tradition versus the new materialism). Is this false?As a retrospective organizing device, no, not false. But almost any dichotomy isan oversimpli¢cation, just as ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ have never at any timerepresented a satisfactory distinction in American politics. Such use of an ex postfacto construct can be wonderfully comforting in its clarity, but must inevitablydestroy ¢ne distinctions, contradictions, and subtleties. It creates a world of blackand white that was experienced by its participants as greyscale. As R. S. Cranewisely observed, ‘dialectical reduction is bound to seem at once too easy andtoo destructive of the observable literal distinctness of works’.28 Are we nowbeyond such reductive devices? I think not. I would suggest that many feministwriters tend to work in dialectical reductions. So do many self-proclaimed newhistoricists. If the politics of Carolean England were as simple as hegemony andcounter-hegemony we would understand them a lot better than we do. One couldsay the same of Shakespeare’s England.

3. The fallacy of genre imposition. Satisfying stories usually have clearly de¢nedbeginnings and endings, with coherent development connecting them. They arealso characterized by structure. Vladimir Propp long ago demonstrated therecurrent patterns that are to be found in fairy tales, and any formalist so inclinedcan ¢nd parallel (if not quite so blatant) patterning in plays and novels. A genera-tion ago Hayden White pointed out in his Metahistory (1973) the rather startlingdegree to which most large-scale histories are governed by ‘emplotment’�thatis, structured along lines tantamount to literary genre.29 Certain structuralpatterns appear to be deeply appealing to human instincts�as for exampleprogress, decline, collapse, recurrence, and providence.30 In the realm of literaryhistory those practitioners content to be essentially descriptive rarely imposesuch patterning, but those inclined towards narrative almost inevitably ¢ndthemselves attracted to logical development and coherence. The sorry falling o¡from the glories of Shakespeare to the moral degradation of Restoration comedywas a story of decline popular with those who worshipped the Renaissance butcarried on beyond 1642 (for exampleThorndike and Nettleton).31 ‘The Rise of theNovel’ (complete with organic tree on the cover of my paperback edition) is the

28 R. S. Crane, ‘Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History’, in The Idea of theHumanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1967), ii. 45^156: 77.29 White has taken a fairly extreme position, maintaining that because narrativist historyis an invented construction its truth must be judged essentially as the truth of ¢ctionis judged. For a sharp but not unfriendly critique of this position, see N. Carroll,‘Interpretation, History, and Narrative’, in B. Fay, P. Pomper, and R. T.Vann (edd.), Historyand Theory: Contemporary Readings (Oxford, 1998), 34^56.30 For a cogent analysis of the use of these patterns in the writing of history, seeG. Graham,The Shape of the Past: A Philosophical Approach to History (Oxford, 1997).31 Contrariwise, those who revelled in dirty plays and satire could exult in Wycherley,Etherege, and Congreve, before lamenting the rising tide of sentimental comedy thatswamped the stage with tears�e.g. John Harold Wilson’s in£uential A Preface to RestorationDrama (1965; repr. Cambridge, Mass., 1968). Of its kind, this is by no means a bad book.


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title of Ian Watt’s much-taught, much-quoted, and horribly perverted telling ofa tale that existed largely in his imagination. In that case the novel ‘rose’ fromDefoe to Richardson in the terms the investigator had established, at which pointnot evenWatt could bring the evidence into any conformity with the demands ofhis story, and after a pro forma gesture at Fielding and Sterne he declared victoryand brought the enterprise to a hasty close.

The underlying question here is whether literary history (an ex post factoamalgam constructed of many writers and works) can plausibly be supposed toevolve, progress (or whatever it does) in the sort of pattern that we use to char-acterize an individual, an institution, or a country. I doubt the appropriateness ofthe carry-over. Literature chugs on. It shows no signs of dying. If it ‘rises’ thenpresumably it comes down again (unless perhaps it goes into orbit?). If itdeclines, then after a while it comes back up again. But these movements areperceived by the later beholder, and they depend almost wholly on the eye ofthat beholder. Like the Rise of the British Empire, virtually any literary-historicalepisode you care to de¢ne can be set forth under the paradigm of Triumph,Tragedy, Decline, or Providence (or indeed whatever you fancy or have beenindoctrinated to impose). As a means of expressing our prejudices or carryingout our present-day agendas we may choose to do this, but one may questionwhether we learn much about the past by imposing such patterning on it.

4. The fallacy of narrative continuity.Terms such as ‘organic’ and ‘evolution’ werethick on the ground forty or ¢fty years ago, and while they are currently in muchless favour, the kind of thinking they re£ect is far from dead.32 Since works ofliterature do not copulate and thereby procreate, the language of evolution is atbest a bad metaphor and at worst a misleading way of seeing change in literature.The delusional nature of simple narrative as a means of presenting (let aloneexplaining) history is old news to anyone coming to the subject from the vantagepoint of theory or historiography. One does not have to be Deleuze (the punis fortuitous) to see the fatuity of linearity. Michel de Certeau says mockinglythat ‘What we initially call history is nothing more than a narrative’ in whicha ‘received meaning is imposed, in a tautological organization expressive only ofthe present time’.33 The conceptual problems have been well explored by suchwriters as Danto and Gossman.34

In purely practical terms, we need to understand that juxtaposing booksor writers does not thereby create any meaningful connection between them.Many a history of poetry moves from Dryden to Pope, but did Dryden in fact

32 For a survey of evolutionary ideas in literary history from the mid-18th to the mid-20thcenturies, see R.Wellek,‘The Concept of Evolution in Literary History’ (1956), repr. in id.,Concepts of Criticism, ed. S. G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven, Conn., 1963), 37^53.Wellek tends to¢nd resistance to evolution ‘antihistorical’ (p. 46), but the seeds of his rejection of evolu-tionary concepts twenty years later are evident even here.33 The Writing of History, 287.34 See A. C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985); L. Gossman, BetweenHistory and Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

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exert signi¢cant in£uence on Pope? We can wriggle round this problem by sayingthat each man represented the tendencies and character of his age, but this solvesone problem by creating another. Major canonical writers are seldom especiallycharacteristic of their times; specialness tends to be what has made them major.Dryden was reasonably representative of some of the subgroups and tendenciesof his time, but Pope (one of the most hated men in the history of Englishliterature) was very far from representing many of the norms of his. We comeback here to the vexing problem of connectedness. Fischer asks a queasy-makingquestion: ‘what is the nature of connections in a narrative series?’35 J. H. Hexterobserves that history writing is full of words and phrases such as ‘tended, grewout of, developed, evolved, trend, development, tendency, evolution, growth’, butthat such terms tend to ‘conceal rather than reveal’ the nature of the allegedconnections they tout.36 Exercising a bit of judicious selection in primary texts,choosing the right secondary sources to cite, and adding a bit of spin, I couldwrite you any of several ‘histories of Restoration comedy’. The Triumph ofSatire (culminating in The Way of the World); From Sex Comedy to Humane Comedy(touting Farquhar); Decline into Sentimentalism (bashing Cibber and Steele). Eachis ‘true’ after a fashion, but the truth lies almost entirely in selectivity and thepresentation of connectives towards an arti¢cial termination point.

5. The fallacy of generic purity. Perhaps by this point a prudent scholar mightfeel inclined to steer clear of Grand Narratives and their attendant claptrap.Can we do better if we restrict ourselves to limited subject-matter over a relativelyshort span of time? This reduction in ambition is unquestionably helpful, butother pitfalls should be noted. Suppose we restrict ourselves to ‘Restorationcomedy’. Leaving aside the issue of what on earth we mean by ‘Restoration’,let us contemplate three important writers of successful plays: Wycherley,Southerne, and Farquhar. Does their work represent an essentially similar con-cept of ‘comedy’? No, very far from it. Southerne’s feminist sensibility and bittercondemnation of libertinism is a world away fromWycherley’s court-wit outlook.The genial tolerance of Farquhar’s late plays is nothing like either of them.Perhaps the problem here is that Wycherley is a 1670s writer; Southerne workedmostly in the period 1682^95; Farquhar was active in the years 1698^1707. Fromthe perspective of the twenty- ¢rst century they occupy pretty much the sametime span, but a lot can change in ¢ve or ten years. American literature of the1950s and American literature of the 1960s are incredibly di¡erent. Possibly weneed to narrow our focus. How about ‘sex comedy circa 1680’? But if we compareOtway’s bitterly pessimistic Friendship in Fashion (1678) or The Souldiers Fortune(1680) with Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds (1681�a cheerful farce) we do not¢nd the same thing at all.

Genre tends to give us little sense of ideology and tone. More broadly,the historian needs to recognize that ‘comedy’ is a virtually meaningless term.

35 Historians’ Fallacies, 162. 36 Hexter, Reappraisals in History, 213.


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As a catch-all indicator (¼ not tragedy) it o¡ers a very rough descriptor, butI would maintain that at no time between 1660 and 1800 are fewer than ¢ve sortsof comedy being written simultaneously. These multiple varieties are imperfectlydistinguishable and ever-changing. They do not hold still and they cannot bereliably identi¢ed with particular authors, who exhibit a most regrettable humantendency towards experimentation and inconsistency. In the ¢rst quarter ofthe eighteenth century I would point to (1) farcical; (2) satirical; (3) humane;(4) reform; and (5) exemplary comedy as common types, with essentially distinctaims in terms of impact on the audience. In the 1790s I would identify at least fourtypes of ‘serious comedy’ alone: (1) drama of sensibility; (2) pathetic drama;(3) moral melodrama; and (4) humanitarian problem drama.37 Decent history, asR. S. Crane insists, comes down to respecting the particularities of individualworks. In so far as literary history consists largely of classi¢cation�a point onwhich David Perkins rightly dwells�we must learn to beware of categories thatfatally blur di¡erences. ‘Comedy’ is not a genre. Rather, it is a nasty jumble ofpotentially interconnecting and always unstable possibilities.

6. The fallacy of theory/practice consistency. A commendably cautious scholar,anxious not to foist our categorizations and de¢nitions on the literature of300 years ago, might reasonably wonder whether we can solve our problems bydeliberately restricting ourselves to categories and de¢nitions propounded bythe people we are studying. The idea has its attractions. Stick to the outlook ofthe time; no conceptual imposition; no ahistorical skewing of results. Even if weare willing to abandon most of the advantages of hindsight, however, a retreat intothe terms of the time is not going to get us very far towards comprehending thelong eighteenth century. The problem is simple: the pronouncements of writersand critics generally turn out to bear little relationship to the poems, plays, andnovels actually written at the time. This came as something of a shock to methirty years ago when I attempted to correlate the aims of comedy as expressedby Carolean playwrights with the comedies they produced.38 The ‘theory’ was infact wildly diverse, but it did virtually nothing to predict or justify (for example)the sex comedy boom of the 1670s. All writers agreed that personal satire wasobjectionable and out of bounds, but somehow quite a lot of personation foundits way onto the stage. And so forth. On re£ection, we should not be surprised bythe inutility of theory-of-the-time. Both writers and critics wrote fromwithin thefads and broils of their time, and both groups inevitably have their own agendas.Our whole view of eighteenth-century comedy was quite stunningly pervertedand falsi¢ed by acceptance of the dichotomy laid down in Goldsmith’s little‘Essay on Laughing and Sentimental Comedy’ (1773), which was really nothingmore than a piece of propaganda put out to rouse sentiment in favour of

37 R. D. Hume,‘The Multifarious Forms of Eighteenth-Century Comedy’, in G.W. Stone,Jr. (ed.), The Stage and the Page: London’s ‘Whole Show’ in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre(Berkeley, Calif., 1981), 3^32.

38 R. D. Hume,‘Theory of Comedy in the Restoration’,Modern Philology, 70 (1973), 302^18.

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She Stoops to Conquer. Beware dichotomies, and beware adoption of the verities ofblatantly self-interested propaganda.

Where does this leave us? With the quicksands of methodological error liableto engulf us whatever our choices (and never mind publishers’ word limits, tenureclocks, and so forth), can we ¢nd a way to practise a defensible literary history?The problems I have just sketched have been understood in some quarters formore than a generation.39 Let us consider brie£y three very di¡erent sorts of with-drawal into less risky kinds of enterprise, which I shall dub catalogue-as-history,snapshots-as-history, and context-as-history respectively.

Eric Rothstein’s Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660 1̂78040 is thework of a smart, learned, senior scholar well aware of pitfalls and fallacies anddetermined not to repeat the errors of his predecessors. Rothstein rejects labels(‘neoclassic’, ‘Augustan’). He does not play period games: the book divides at 1720‘simply because that year is the middle of the period the book covers: the dateis arbitrary so as to avoid imposing any groupings of my own contrivance’.41

Causal explanation is not eschewed but is attempted with admirable caution(‘Occasionally I have speculated about historical changes. None the less, I havetried to remember that not all changes have reasons’42). Major authors areneither scanted nor made unduly prominent.The chapter focuses and structuresare not the dog-and-pony show of George Sherburn’s volume in the BaughLiterary History of England (4 volumes, 1948, 1967) or the Oxford History ofEnglish Literature (15 volumes, 1945^97), but rather a sophisticated constructiondesigned to show what a wide variety of poets were trying to do and to ‘presentthe poets’ rationale for doing what they did’.43 A chronological appendix listsprincipal poems and collections and intersperses some brief current-historyorientation at ¢ve-year intervals. Thundering generalizations are scrupulouslyavoided. Given the magnitude of the subject and the author’s admirable refusalto cop a plea and commit the standard atrocities, why do I feel so lukewarmabout the results? One problem is the very care with which the author handlesthe material. One gets more sense of judiciousness than excitement. Few risksof any kind are taken. Arguments, judgements, and conclusions are cautiousand carefully hedged. The descriptive survey is just and accurate but not veryinviting. Personally, I agree with Rothstein’s refusal to focus on ‘major’¢gures, though the results are hard reading for anyone who is not already familiarwith a lot of the material. But for the well-read and sophisticated reader,how needful is this sort of survey? As a descriptive catalogue in narrativeform this one is admirable for its avoidance of gross error, but frankly somewhat

39 Crane’s ‘Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History’ was written in 1950,published in 1967, and issued as a separate book in 1971. Unremittingly abstract thoughit is, Crane’s essay would tell you in its own terms quite a lot of what I have said here.40 Vol. iii of the Routledge History of English Poetry (London, 1981).41 Ibid., p. xiii. 42 Ibid., p. xii. 43 Ibid.


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boring. I have had little luck in persuading even graduate students to readthe book.

Catalogues tend to be numbingly inclusive; snapshots are maddeningly scrappyand disjunct. A distinguished exemplar of the snapshot method is A New Historyof French Literature.44 The subject is covered from 778 to 1985 in 199 close-focussnippets totalling some 1,100 pages. We get such chapterlets as ‘1664: JansenistTragedy’, ‘1699: Racine and the French New Criticism’, ‘1725: The Politics ofEpistolary Art’, and ‘1788: Civil Rights and the Wrongs of Women’. The contrib-utors are distinguished experts; one will ¢nd something said on most writersof signi¢cance (though not on all works of importance); extreme speci¢citymakes for more vivid and interesting writing than is common in broader surveys.No periodization is imposed (a major blessing), and ‘No article is conceived asa comprehensive presentation of a single author’ so that ‘There are, for example,several Rousseaus’.45 Fragmentation of chronology and perspective is healthy inmany ways, and the deliberate attempt ‘to disrupt the traditional orderliness ofmost histories of literature’ is welcome. This history explicitly refuses to supplysynthesis, broad comparisons, and what we might call foundational paradigms.My own opinion (as an outsider) is that the volume is stimulating to professionalspecialists (who will know how to orient and connect the fragments), but that itwould prove largely bewildering to the ‘general reader’ for whom it is said tobe conceived. Abandoning narrative as connective is ¢ne, but when connectivityitself starts to disappear are we left with anything but a world of atoms in chaos?

An utterly di¡erent methodology is adopted in Cox and Kastan’s ANew Historyof Early English Drama.46 It comprises twenty- ¢ve chapters by divers hands, includ-ing some very ¢ne essays about such subjects as publication of plays, venues,performance conditions, censorship, audience, manuscripts, and revisions ofscripts. I would, however, challenge at least three words in the title. The book isnot a ‘history’ (it does not really address issues of sequence and change); ‘early’conveys no precise meaning to me; and ‘drama’ is utterly misleading, since thebook is not about plays but rather about the circumstances in which plays werewritten, performed, and viewed. I have to wonder whether the title was a market-ing ploy on the part of the publisher, since the collection�a very ¢ne collection,let me emphasize�makes hardly even a gesture towards dealing with literatureitself. We could evade the methodological di⁄culties of ‘literary history’ byeliminating all consideration of literature, but if this is the solution then why notjunk the whole enterprise? I realize that ‘contexts’ is a terribly boring word, butthis is a book about contexts, not a history�and certainly not a history of drama.

Both of the last two books have been conceived and designed to avoid theobjections routinely £ung at ‘literary histories’ in recent decades. Both areadmirable in many ways, though neither seems to me to o¡er much help inreviving the possibilities of sequential history. I have a few modest suggestions,

44 Ed. D. Hollier (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 45 Ibid., p. xix.

46 Ed. J. D. Cox and D. Scott Kastan (NewYork, 1997).

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but I shall reserve them for the moment while we consider what may be learnedby enquiring into the issue of how we are to justify our constructions.

IV. The Issue of Validation

Suppose that we have built our critical machine, constructed our account, andduly moved from point A to point B (however de¢ned and justi¢ed).What sort of‘justi¢cation’ is then requisite? (‘Proof ’ is perhaps too dire a demand.) A greatdeal of literary history has been written in a ¢ne ex cathedra style, but how muchare we prepared to take on faith? Legitimation of grubby results in practicehas rarely interested students of historiography, who tend to be much moreconcerned about theoretical issues. In any case true believers in literary historysee no reason to worry; unbelievers consider the case hopeless.

In science, one expects replicability of experimental results. If you theorizebeyond available evidence, you hope to be able to acquire evidence that willcon¢rm or demolish your hypotheses. In some social science ¢elds, models canbe built and tested. Our territories do not tend to work in these fashions.The ideaof ‘proving’ an interpretation of a single work has largely been abandoned in thelast thirty years. This strikes me as good and bad�good because the idea of thesingle ‘right reading’ is nonsensical; bad because not all readings are equallygood, and some are demonstrably false. In the realm of historical scholarship(as opposed to textual interpretation or literary history) I have myself recentlyargued that documentary reconstruction should be distinguished from extrapolativeanalysis and historical theorizing, and that these activities are radically di¡erent interms of the kinds of validation that are possible. In the hard-core realm of‘historical scholarship’ as I prefer to de¢ne it, the results need to be potentiallysubject to empirical validation�and one hopes that another scholar, assessing thesame evidence, would arrive at essentially similar results.47 Where then does‘literary history’ ¢t in this paradigm?

A NewYorker cartoon shows a father sitting on his young son’s bed, saying,‘It’sa bedtime story. It doesn’t need corroboration.’48 If we are writing the academicequivalent of bedtime stories, then we are no doubt entitled to count one good ifit pleases us, entertains us, or satis¢es our prejudices. If this is our position, thenliterary history is indeed bunkum, and we can be happy with it as such. But if weare not prepared to go to this extreme, then what sorts of ‘truth value’ can beclaimed for literary history? Let us consider several sorts of claims that mightbe made (and to which objection might be raised).

1. Probably very few people would support total disregard of simple facts.People would fuss at me if I asserted that Dryden wroteThe Country-Wife unlessI could put forward new evidence on the point.

47 See Hume,‘The Aims and Limits of Historical Scholarship’, RES, NS 53 (2002), 399^422.

48 B. Manko¡ (ed.),The NewYorker Book of Literary Cartoons (New York, 2000), 5.


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2. Some kinds of claim rest on quanti¢able evidence. The ¢ne old tale of thedominance of sentimental comedy (followed by the triumphant revolution ofGoldsmith and Sheridan against it) is in fact wrong and can be devastatinglyrefuted with reference to daily performance records across many decades. Onemust, of course, possess the pertinent data: what can be done in the eighteenthcentury is essentially impossible in the seventeenth century or earlier. Even in theface of overwhelming evidence such stories have astonishing resistance to logic.Most of the evidence was put in print by John Genest in 1832,49 but the sad storyof the triumph of sentimental comedy remained almost totally dominant into the1970s and retains a popular life to this day. If there is a way of putting a stakethrough the hearts of such abominations we do not seem to have found it.

3. We get into trouble when we come to historical assertions founded on thechoice and reading of texts. Our inherited canon is hard to justify on either quali-tative or historical grounds, but what keeps non-canonicity from being merelyarbitrary or personal? Even when we have opted for inclusion, the problem ofassured comprehension remains. Is The Country-Wife a delightful celebration oflibertinism? A disgusting celebration of libertinism? A harsh satirical attack onits degraded characters? A right way/wrong way satire on Horner that holds upHarcourt and Alithea as a high moral norm? Intelligent and learned scholars havemade all four cases (and more).50 Literary history depends heavily on character-ization of the works it comprises, and how can we write history if we cannot agreeon the nature of those works? Historiographers seem to have worried surprisinglylittle about this di⁄culty, but it is far from insigni¢cant. We may doubt, to besure, that seventeenth-century readers or audience members all saw Wycherley’splay in the same way any more than we do. I would draw the conclusion that aliterary history dependent on ‘right readings’ does not have a good future.

4. Can we solve the problem by refusing to rely on readings of individual worksand retreating into a more general realm of ideas? We might, for example, tracethe ‘rise of sensibility’ over a period of decades, connecting its literary manifesta-tions to ideas in philosophy and religion.This is Hindsight History, but why not?I continue to ¢nd Stuart Tave’s The Amiable Humorist (1960) very persuasive:I believe that good work can be done in this mode. I admit that such workcannot pretend to be anything but constructivist and that it cannot be otherthan radically selective in its treatment of evidence. ‘Proof ’ lies almost entirelyin the realm of instinct. Much depends on the connectives adduced by thehistorian, and what one historian adduces another can rebut�as for example inDonald Greene’s devastating demolition (Modern Philology, 1977) of R. S. Crane’sfamous essay on the genealogy of the man of feeling (English Literary History, 1934).

49 John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols.(Bath, 1832).

50 On the interpretative chaos attaching to this play, see J. Milhous and R. D. Hume,Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675 1̂707 (Carbondale, Ill., 1985), ch. 3. Nothinghas been settled since 1985, and probably never will be.

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‘Proof ’ of broad assertions is a problem hardly ever taken up by practitioners ofliterary history, who have basically failed to confront the sorts of issues raiseda generation ago in the ‘Gottschalk Report’.51

5. When we get to labels we are de¢nitely out of the realm of proof. Catchylabels can be highly seductive. Consider Northrop Frye’s little nine-page essaycalled ‘Towards De¢ning an Age of Sensibility’ (ELH, 1956), which must be oneof the most in£uential contributions of the last ¢fty years to our perception ofthe later eighteenth century. Frye gathers some plausible examples, characterizesthings in a sentence or two, ignores whatever does not ¢t his concept�and heypresto, a label. Such designations tend to please us best if not subjected toclose scrutiny and challenge. Omissions, contradictions, and dubious character-izations are generally easy to ¢nd. But do we really prefer to get things right?Howard D. Weinbrot can come along and shred Frye’s pretty fancy,52 but thereare plenty of those who are very happy believing in the Great Pumpkin and¢nd themselves disinclined to face the possibility that their faith may be totallymisplaced. Characterization cannot be proved, but it is subject to challenge fromparticular evidence, if anyone will listen.

6. Sequential survey that claims to provide causal explanation moves usyet further outside the bounds of serious proof. Peter Bu« rger comments acidlythat, in such history, ‘The reader is confronted with a narrator, who gives himinteresting informations [sic] but does neither explicitate [sic] a problematic norformulate alternative answers which could be discussed.Thus the reader lacks thepossibility to verify the account; for the simple reason that a narrative cannot becriticized, except by another narrative on the same topic.’53 I venture to suggestthat certain kinds of objection are possible. If someone can pick a di¡erent setof ‘examples’ and thereby produce a radically di¡erent result, then the constructfails on the grounds of misleading selectivity. But it is a ‘construct’, and as such itcannot be ‘proven’ in objectivist terms.

One response to this situation is to take a gloomy view of such history (as I do).An alternative response is to argue that unveri¢ability in terms of historical factfrees us from the burden of attempting to supply such veri¢cation. Presumablywe should refrain from asserting that Milton wrote Sodom or that Dryden wasa Whig, but beyond the level of simple fact ‘the story’ becomes its own justi¢ -cation. A forceful statement in favour of this sort of history has been made bySiegfried J. Schmidt. He starts from the premise that ‘Literary history is withoutany doubt a social and political institution’ and that ‘Writing literary historieshas always served political interests which have normally been disguised as

51 See L. Gottschalk (ed.), Generalization in the Writing of History, report of the Committeeon Historical Analysis of the Social Science Research Council (Chicago, 1963).52 ‘Northrop Frye and the Literature of Process Reconsidered’, Eighteenth-Century Studies,24 (1990^91), 173^95.

53 ‘On Literary History’, Poetics, 14 (1985), 199^207, quotation at pp. 199^200.


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educational, cultural, or aesthetical intentions or even as quasi natural exigencies’.In his view, the inevitably constructivist nature of literary history makes it‘a theory-governed construction’ in which we ‘produce plausible and inter-subjectively acceptable models of ‘‘past events’’ ’. Consequently ‘we must admitthat we have to apply criteria other than truth, objectivity, or reliability to literaryhistories, and that we have to formulate social functions for literary historiesother than that of providing a true report on ‘‘what has been the case’’ ’. Schmidtconsiders this a great help ‘with respect to the problem of legitimation’, since‘any legitimatory argument depends directly upon the presupposed (or mostlyimplied) de¢nition of concepts’ supplied by the historian. Because ‘literaryhistories are constructions and not reconstructions’, we should in his opinionsimply abandon traditional teleological models of history. ‘Literary history is notto be modelled like a chain of events determined by causal relations and imme-diate e¡ects but as a theory-guided plausible concatenation of variable elementsof the respective (past and present) world-models of literary historians’.54

The reader will not be astonished to learn that I am fairly appalled by thisconclusion, but Schmidt is no fool and he and I are actually responding to avirtually identical perception of the impossibility of validating Master Narrativehistory in any meaningful way. He sees this as a wonderful opportunity to writetheory- and ideology-driven constructivist accounts of the past; I see it as apowerful argument for sticking to what we can make work in realms where valida-tion can be demanded in terms that go beyond the historian’s own de¢nitions.Like R. G. Collingwood, I am basically content to refrain from claiming ‘truth’ inany grand metaphysical sense, while attempting to make sure that my constructsand explanations ‘¢t facts’ so far as facts are known. If legitimation is basicallya matter of ‘Ain’t it pretty?’ then I think we are in the business of writing ¢ction,not history.

V. Defensible Practice in Literary History

Is there any evidence that we need the type of discourse provided by literary histories?55

What do we want from literary history? Orientation for beginners? Dogmafor true believers? Reconstruction of original viewpoint? Reassessment from thevantage point of the present? We have here four substantially di¡erent enterprisesand they need not be construed as inimical to one another.Tolerance of diversityis good; tolerance of error is not. Galileo and Ptolemy did not provide equallygood ways of seeing the heavens. If lines need to be drawn, then where?

Perhaps we can learn something from a sister discipline. Assessing the stateof histories of philosophy, Richard Rorty distinguishes among (and defends)

54 ‘On Writing Histories of Literature: Some Remarks from a Constructivist Point ofView’, Poetics, 14 (1985), 279^301, quotations at pp. 287, 285, 293, 294.55 Bu« rger,‘On Literary History’, 199.

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‘contextualist accounts which block o¡ later developments from sight’ (Skinnerianreconstruction), ‘ ‘‘Whiggish’’ accounts which draw on our own better knowledge’,and ‘big sweeping geistesgeschichtlich’ story writing. He is more optimistic aboutthe third variety than I am, though of course philosophy is a somewhat moremanageable-sized subject than literature and its major ¢gures often connectmore clearly than do poets and novelists. Heaping scorn on what he calls‘Doxography’, which seems to ‘decorticate the thinkers’ discussed, he says £atlythat ‘We should just stop trying to write books called A History of Philosophy’.He concludes the essay with a plea for a kind of scholarship that drops ‘belowthe skipping-from-peak-to-peak level of Geistesgeschichte to the nitty-gritty ofintellectual history’. Both his tolerance and his intolerance seem salutary.56

In recent decades virtually all ambitious literary histories (like the newCambridge History of English Literature) have adopted the strategy of multi-authorfragmentation. There are genuine virtues to this approach. Specialists can dealknowledgeably with small areas. If no overall viewpoint is adopted and imposedthen you cannot be attacked for it. Room is opened up for divergent opinionand even outright disagreement. Objections can be raised. Schmidt challenges‘montage or collage’ history on the grounds that the pieces do not ¢t togetherand that the ‘reproach of relativism’ cannot be escaped.57 I would argue thatcollage is limited but useful. It gives us lots of disjunct, highly particularsnapshots with no e¡ort at continuity and little sense of broader explanations.Collage tends, however, to have the virtue of more intense engagement withthe material covered, and more potentiality for critical argument as opposed tovapid description. As a mode, however, collage is poorly ¢tted to supply muchin the way of synoptic analysis.

Can collage be taken beyond fragmentation? The Annales school wouldcertainly say so: the picture of longue dure¤ e must almost always be constructedfrom close-focus studies of particulars dealt with in short duration. Perhapswe can learn from Foucault’s insistence on the possibility of multiple parallelhistories, depending on how one identi¢es one’s subject and de¢nes one’s disci-pline. Can a plurality of sometimes contradictory ‘little histories’ (each a petit re¤ cit,in Lyotard’s phrase) be synthesized into a master narrative?58 Without going tothe extreme of fractal history, I think we might fruitfully explore the possibilitiesof overlapping ‘little histories’. So far as I can see, di¡erent parts of history andculture have separate, partially distinct overlapping territories and periods.

56 R. Rorty, ‘TheHistoriography of Philosophy: FourGenres’, in R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind,and Q. Skinner (edd.), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy(Cambridge, 1984), 49^75, quotations at pp. 56, 61^2, 65, 70.57 ‘OnWriting Histories of Literature’, 284.58 See J.-F. Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Benningtonand B. Massumi (Minneapolis, Minn., 1984), 60. I have many disagreements with Lyotard,but I want to express my admiration for his serious engagement with the problems of‘legitimation’ and ‘delegitimation’ in this book.


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Whether they build tidily into ‘general’ periods I am inclined to doubt. Whyshould drama, ¢ction, music, art, politics, transportation, etc. not each havea periodization of its own? They have impact on one another, but they havetheir own cohesion as well. I would suggest also that there is considerable virtueto overlapping/competing ‘little histories’ within a single realm�for example,poetry in the time of Charles II. I suspect that they would combine satisfactorilyonly if we could accept much untidier and more pluralistic master narratives.Perhaps ‘snapshots’ could be fruitfully interspersed with speculative overviews�or better yet, con£icting overviews. Georg Iggers is surely correct when he observesthat, though ‘microhistory’ is ‘legitimate’ (and much more subject to validation),it can neither ‘escape’ nor even successfully address ‘the framework of largerstructures and transformations in which this history takes place’.59 An imaginablealternative�well beyond the bounds of my own experience and preferences�would be a more fractal concept of history, attempting to construct a Derridean/Deleuzean non-linear, non-teleological ‘history’ (perhaps ‘picture’ would be afairer term) foregrounding repetition-with-di¡erence. This strikes me, actually,as being quite as defensible as the method of selective representation beingadopted for the thirteen-volume Oxford English Literary History now gettingunder way.60

‘Do no harm’ is a ¢rst principle in medicine, and perhaps it ought to be inliterary history as well. One hopes, naturally, to do good. Perhaps the ¢rst stepon both counts is to insist that the method employed should be explicit andabove-board. Aims, principles of selection, and concept of construction ought tobe disclosed.The extent of causal explanation claimed should be stated, as should‘truth claims’ and the nature of validation (if any) to be attempted. A genuinedanger is that fear of error should paralyse us. Good history is not bland, neutral,and purely factual. It asks hard questions; o¡ers arguments; grapples withrecalcitrant and unsatisfactory materials; exhibits the excitement of explorationand discovery. Trying to get facts right and to avoid misrepresentation or da¡yconclusions does not mean that the historian should refrain from judgement.

What exactly might one legitimately claim to do in a thirty-page account ofsixty years of English drama? What I said at the outset of my Cambridge History ofEnglish Literature essay consisted of a disclaimer (‘To write a meaningful narrativehistory of new plays is not feasible’) and a modest claim (‘We can, however, try tosee how the dominant genres changed and how they were a¡ected by theatricalcircumstances’). Why most of those changes occurred is a problem I would nottackle on a bet. Big Picture history can be entertaining, and it gives a (sometimesfalse) sense of coherence and orientation. But when it is employed to imposecoercive readings on particular works then it becomes an active evil. The biggerthe picture, the greater the di⁄culties of serious validation. Really big pictures

59 Historiography in theTwentieth Century, 143.60 On which see Jonathan Bate’s promotional explanation inTLS, 4 Oct. 2002.

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tend de facto to be syntheses of specialist studies, in which case the synthesizer isdependent both upon those sources and on the degree to which they combineand add up to something meaningful and defensible.

By way of conclusion let us return to the question of aim. Literary history is nota single enterprise, and one variety does not suit the needs of all customers.At least ¢ve varieties need to be identi¢ed.61

1. The broad-orientation map aimed at beginners, the literary version of thesort of thing that undertakes to ‘tell the story of the USA’ in 200 pages. The lesscausal explanation the better, and the same goes for easy labels and dichotomies.As a respectable example of a dodgy form I will o¡er Richard W. Bevis, EnglishDrama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660 1̂789 (London, 1988).

2. The comprehensive dictionary of writers/works (a non-linear enterprise).This can be done at anything from the elementary to the super-scholarly level.If ‘context’ is to be supplied then it needs to be done without cliche¤ d labels andcategories. A compilation like Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and AmericanWomen Writers, 1660 1̂800 (Totowa, NJ, 1985) will often prove useful even to thespecialist.

3. Survey of a limited subject (for example political drama in the era ofWalpole),with an attempt at consideration of the multitudinous factors that impinge on it.Here one can provide detailed and technical analysis with exclusions and selectiv-ity minimized. John J. Richetti’s Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns1700 1̂739 (Oxford, 1969) and J. Paul Hunter’s Before Novels: The Cultural Contextsof Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York, 1990) both seem to me to conveyhonest and unpretentious pictures of a wide range of ‘novels’ before 1740. Onemay, to be sure, study attitudes of writers and critics, as Paulina Kewes has donein Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660 1̂710 (Oxford,1998), a book that traces changes in attitude towards literary originality, use ofsource materials, and the rise of drama to ‘literary’ status.

4. Broader surveys of the collage variety employing the fragmentation strategy(for example the new Cambridge History of English Literature and the CambridgeHistory of British Theatre). The tradeo¡ here is vivid particularities at the cost ofinevitably blurring the Big Picture.Validation is not much of an issue beyond thelevel of individual essays.

5. Master Narrative history of the sort that cannot really be validated (butwhich can sometimes be pecked to bits by specialists who are better groundedin nitty-gritty particulars than the Master Narrator). Harold Bloom’s The Anxietyof In£uence (1973) seems to me of this sort. Its overview can be dazzling until onestarts to apply it, author by author, work by work, and discovers that the theoryseems irrelevant to a very large number of them.

61 Some readers of my draft have asked me how I would justify these forms of practiceepistemologically. Such justi¢cation as I can o¡er may be found in chapter 1 ofReconstructing Contexts.


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Panoramic representation of sequential progression in literature will probablyalways remain an ignis fatuus temptation to the literary historian. For thebeginning student or the reader for pleasure, such sketches do no great harm,especially if they are conducted with reasonable restraint in imposing periodcharacterizations, satisfying dichotomies, and over-generalized causal explana-tions. For the serious student of literature such maps are more misleading thanhelpful. A map of England, Scotland, and Wales on a single book page is a ¢nedevice for orientation. It will probably not help a lot in getting you from Londonto Birmingham, let alone from Tottenham Court Road to Chancery Lane. If youwant to know who Thomas Durfey was, what he wrote, and what importanceit may have, then you are probably better o¡ with a literary encyclopediathan with a sequential history of any kind. If you want to know in some technicaldetail what makes the English literary world of 1680 radically di¡erent from thatof 1676, then you need a close-focus account of the 1670s (Spurr’s England in the1670s would serve well), or perhaps better yet something like Owen’s RestorationTheatre and Crisis�an account of drama in the time of the Exclusion Crisis.62

If you want to know what sort of literature was written in the late seventeenthcentury, your best bet would be a fairly brief overview written by someone notdetermined to impose a period concept and willing to present a picture of diver-gence, contradiction, and inconsistency that does not necessarily ‘make sense’,or re£ect tidy-anything.

If the generation of bunkum is not our objective, then what is? And how dowe go about producing it in ways that will create potentially validatable results?Literary history is undeniably our creation and its correspondence with theactual past cannot simply be assumed. It is constructed from materials selectedby the historian, who must inevitably have preferences and preconceptions.No historian starts as a tabula rasa, and evidence cannot be assessed in purelyobjective/impartial ways. Some contamination of our material cannot be avoided.But if ‘bottom up’ is an exploded positivist delusion, ‘top down’ is not muchof an alternative. Not many historians these days (other than some left-overneo-Marxists) really subscribe to a theory of history.We are left in an uncomfort-able middle position, but we can achieve much if we limit our ambitions to thepotentially feasible.

History that attempts to explain (in so far as evidence will permit) rather thanmerely describe and characterize is, I suspect, best attempted at the level ofnitty-gritty detail over relatively limited spans of time. Selectivity should be keptto a minimum and no governing theory should be imposed.Within the con¢nesof a restricted subject the historian can attempt to be comprehensive. The bestliterary history will, I think, be written by those prepared to accept and respectthe chaotic, illogical, and often maddening contradictions of people and events.

62 J. Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000); S. J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis(Oxford, 1996).

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Leopold von Ranke once said that the historian was to show the past wie eseigentlich gewesen�as it really was. A century of epistemology and phenomenologyhas taught us that this is, philosophically speaking, a false goal. But in anothersense the dictum represents a legitimate ideal.The production of literature�yearby year, decade by decade, century by century�is very far from tidy, rational,and explicable. To pretend that it is these things�to supply us with comfortingbedtime stories�is not only to falsify history but to trivialize the literature thatwe devote our lives to puzzling over.

The Pennsylvania State University


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hume, robert. construction and legitimation in literary history

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