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Contexts and Companions
Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and Stephen E. Karian, editors Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. xvii, 305 pages
John Sitter, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xix, 298 pages
What is the most productive relationship between literary and historical studies? Is there a particular relationship best suited to eighteenth-century studies? There have been several "returns to history" during the last several decades, especially as new historicism reached its zenith. If unsupported by attentive scholarship, however, historical orientation can have unfortunate results. Literature may be entirely conflated with its historical contexts; political issues may be overemphasized at the expense of literary meanings; and complexities in early modern history may be presented naively, anachronistically reduced to modern concerns, or sorted out according to simplistic categories. That such shortcomings in historically-based analysis should be avoided is obvious, but what methods should be used for responsible, productive criticism is not. In recently published scholarship, we can detect new or renewed interest in topics that reflect historical focus, including sharply delimited studies that several years ago might have seemed too narrowly defined. The anthologies considered here suggest possible answers to the question concerning the most productive relationship between literature and history.
Because the essays in the festschrift for Phillip Harth investigate historical contexts for literature in ways he would approve of, we are fortunate to find scrupulous attention to individual texts, authors, critical quarrels, historical moments, and publication histories. These investigations demonstrate the utility and power found in rigorously researched, meticulously described renderings of historical matters. The anthology eschews grand narratives and refuses to make facile connections between eighteenth-century literature and our own twenty-first-century politics. Any reader who is casting about for ways to arrive at historically supported and fully articulated-yet appropriately provisional-conclusions will find this anthology exemplary.
Eighteenth-Century Contexts reminds us of the importance of Harth's work. For almost five decades, Harth has refined the approaches he adopted from R. S. Crane and others of the Chicago School. Working from a skeptical, humanist tradition, Harth has tried to avoid making assumptions about a literary work that could distort meanings as an early modern audience would have understood them....