What is literary "history"?

The meaning of "history" in "literary history" is a more recalcitrant topic than our familiarity with the term is likely to suggest. The question is hardly new; the last half-century has seen a good many hard-fought matches between notable critics and this complexly recalcitrant topic. Rene Wellek's "Six Types of Literary History" (1946) and "The Fall of Literary History" (1973), R. S. Crane's "Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History" (1967), Geoffrey Hartman's "Toward Literary History" (1970), Hans Robert Jauss's "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory" (1970), Robert Weimann's Structure and Society in Literary History (1976; Epilogue, 1984), and David Perkins's Is Literary History Possible? (1992) represent a range of perspectives intriguingly reflecting changes in literary theory over four decades. Clarity as to the role, indeed the meaning, of literary history has acquired a special exigence in the last half-dozen years as historicisms of various hues have been regaining respectability in literary theory and practice. A good deal of writing about literature would be clearer if critics and theorists explicitly recognized the number of different ways in which "literary history" is presently used. It is not at all difficult to find the term shifting meanings within the same essay, for instance here designating historical context, there designating the history of a literary form. But statements applicable to literary history in one sense are not necessarily applicable to it in one of the others.

Two partially intertwined problems are major sources of the considerable confusion. The first is the ambiguity in the uses of the words "literary history" resulting from an accretion of partially overlapping meanings over the years. The second arises from contemporary debates over the possibility of linguistic reference and the difficulty of writing history of any sort. If, as some of the most influential contemporary literary theorists seem to continue to hold, words cannot refer to an extralinguistic reality, to speak of historical fact may seem naive. In the words of Terence Hawkes: "A language ... does not construct its formations of words by reference to the patterns of 'reality,' but on the basis of its own internal and self-sufficient rules" (16-17). Taken at face value, such a position would seem to reduce all attempts at literary history to unconfirmable linguistic...