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Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fiction and the Nineteenth Century Novel, by Robert Kiely; pp. x + 302. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, $34.95.
In the wake of critics like David Perkins who ask whether literary history is still possible, Robert Kiely confirms that the answer is "yes." Kiely underlines the extent to which the study of literature has been (and continues to be) historical. Literature, that is, derives much of its significance from its ability both explain the past and to be explained by the past. Yet if the force of Literature continues to be historical, Kiely is not content to stand by and simply retell the same old historical tales for the same old purposes. "However hard we may try apply historical hindsight," he reminds us, "we cannot truly read the texts of the past unless we make them our own" (18). Proceeding from this fundamentally hermeneutic position, Reverse Tradition attempts to take both literary history and postmodernism seriously in order to imagine how literary history could now be written differently.
This may seem like an unusual combination f interests, insofar as postmodernism has sometimes been viewed as the theoretical stake driven through the heart of literary history. But in Kiely's hands postmodernism breathes new Life into the corpse--or corpus--of literary history. The literary history presented in Reverse Tradition relies neither on chronological order nor on a strict...