Intro to History of Am.Lit.

History of Literature in English: American Realism 1865-1914

As the term itself makes clear, "literary history" is an attempt to historicize literature, to
link text and history. This cannot be a matter of bare chronology. Surely enough, the literary
historian is interested in the when of a literary work, but also in its where, how, and why. The
literary historian investigates the time and place of a work's composition, its generic affinities, the
extent to which it fits into or deviates from the author's literary production and the literary
tradition as a whole, the interaction between the culture that produced it (by way of the author)
and which it influences in turn (by way of readers and critics). The literary historian's primary
concern, then, is that of establishing relationships between a literary work and culture at large
(society, politics, geography, religion, philosophy, etc.), as well as with the literary practice in
particular (genre, style, motifs, etc.).

A major requirement for literary historians is never to forget the primacy of the literary
work. As such the historicity or "pastness" of an art work is also an aesthetic component and
very much a "given," as Lionel Trilling puts it in "The Sense of the Past." Understanding the
historicity of an art work is tantamount to making it alive for the present reader. It does not mean
that this art work literally becomes contemporaneous.

Trilling's argument resembles that of T.S.Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
(1920). In this essay Eliot investigates the relation of the poet-critic to the past. He rejects the
encomium of originality or novelty and pleads for a revaluation of tradition. For this purpose he
has to divest the term of its negative connotations, in the sense of conservative, old-fashioned etc.
What Eliot means by the poet-critic's "historical sense" is not a "blind or timid adherence" to
tradition, but something obtained "by great labour," a simultaneous perception of past and
present, national and international literature, which obviously involves a comparative challenge.
This comparison affects the literature of the past as well as that of the present. Furthermore, their
interaction explains the need for a constant revision of literary history, for any new work of art
affects those produced in the past.

Like Trilling, Eliot considers the "historical sense" an "aesthetic" principle, but unlike
Trilling he goes further than that. The "simultaneity" of past and present literature, the "ideal
order" they constitute, together with the "impersonal theory of poetry" which Eliot constructs on
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its basis in the remainder of the essay, may betray an essentializing bent. Consequently, the critic
with a "historical sense" may be seduced into projecting his contemporary interpretation upon
past literature.

All the same, T.S. Eliot, as mentioned, recognizes the constant need to rewrite literary
history. The aesthetic "given-ness" of literature's historicity does not make it immune to revision.
Interpretation is always to some extent a varied and arbitrary activity. This is well illustrated in
the periodizations to which literary historians are prone, ever since the nineteenth century
German "genetic school." In the first place, this school of literary historians traced the origins of
literary works. In the second place, it divided literary history in chronological and geographical
units on the evidence of dominant literary characteristics. The extent to which these literary
characteristics are seen to conform with extra-literary features depends very much on the relative
autonomy granted literature by the critic in question. The underlying assumption of traditional
periodizations was that history followed a certain pattern, such as the biological or evolutionary
one. These patterns are now recognized to be impositions on a basically unpredictable historical
reality, imaginative constructions "after the fact." The same applies to the divisions according to
decades or centuries, ruling monarchs, political events, philosophy, religion, etc.

Still, the tentativeness and arbitrariness of interpretations or divisional categories does not
preclude their need or usefulness. If the literary historian wants to avoid that his history remains
a compilation of arid facts, he must fashion them into a configuration, an interpretative scheme.
Such schemes should also guard the critic from the danger of pure subjectivism or
impressionism, lurking in the kind of literary criticism that stresses the uniqueness and autonomy
of every literary text. And to avoid further deception of the reader, he better divulge this
interpretation right from the start. Interpretations indeed govern the critic's decisions, e.g., about
which authors to deal with and which ones to omit, which ones to "canonize" and which ones to
marginalize. In his unfinished three-volume Main Currents in American Thought (1927, 1930),
Vernon Louis Parrington basically traced America's liberal tradition. By contrast, V.F.Calverton
chronicled The Liberation of American Literature, as his 1932 study is called. This liberation
entailed to him the conquest of a national inferiority complex with regard to British literature and
an oppressive American bourgeois morality, aided in part by the rise of the proletarian
movement. Ludwig Lewisohn's Expression in America (1932) evaluated American literature in
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terms of its relative confrontation with the irrational. Whatever the interpretative scheme, it will
in all likelihood be guided by an idea of America's national character, no matter how difficult
such idea may be arrived at.

The multiple authorship of classic literary histories such as the Literary History of the
United States, edited by Robert E.Spiller and others (1948, 1974), or the recently published
Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott (1988), obviously results
in multiple interpretations. This may be considered a drawback or an asset, depending on
whether coherence and unity or variety are valued. In fact, the diversity of the older literary
history is very much subordinated to the hegemony of the New Critical approach, something that
is no longer conceivable in the present, with its array of critical methods.

New Criticism was the dominant critical school before and after the second World War,
led in the U.S. by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R.P.Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren and
Cleanth Brooks; in G.B. by T.S.Eliot, I.A.Richards, and William Empson. It shunned
biographical or psychological, socio-historical and moral interpretations in favour of an
"objective" criticism through "close reading." As such it was a practical criticism. Linguistic
complexity, irony and wit were preferred to lyric expression or personal reflection. The New
Critics defended the aesthetic autonomy of the art work, as well as the specificity and truth value
of the literary language. It was most effective when applied to poetry.

New Criticism was followed by "new paradigms," such as genre criticism, existentialist,
phenomenological, reader-response, structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructive criticism.
This abundance of critical approaches made "consensus literary history making" henceforth
impossible, whether that of Spiller's Literary History of the United States or that of the old
Cambridge History of American Literature, whose fifty odd contributors shared a single view of
the cultural past and the belief that this view could be articulated in a neat, unified narrative. The
optimistic vision of American destiny, underlying the histories of Parrington's generation, has
fallen into disrepute. Just so, the elitist idea of literature, warranting the elaboration of a strict
canon, underlying the histories of F.O.Matthiessen's contemporaries, has been repudiated.

As a case in point of the demise of consensus literary history-making, we now have at our
disposal the 1988 Columbia Literary History of the United States. This volume radically reflects
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the present welter of critical approaches which partly follows from the developments in critical
theory, partly from the divergence of opinions about America's national identity. If the dominant
school of the 1940s and 1950s was the New Critical or formalist one, it had to contend with the
positivist school which still conceived of history in traditional terms. In these terms history was a
chronicle of "facts" which research assembled and ascertained "true" and literary historians could
then rely on to establish the absolute "meaning" of literary texts. However, from the mid-1960s
onwards, the absoluteness of history and of literature's meaning were questioned, just as its
ideological underpinnings were revealed and attacked. As a result literary history tends towards
radical relativism, even the downright dissolution of the discipline. In practice, the education and
informedness of literary historians create a minimum of consensus necessary to carry on. And to
the extent that their views remain thoroughly personal they need only acknowledge them as such.
A case in point is perhaps The New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and
Werner Sollors (Harvard UP, 2009).