Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies 9780804788441

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W h y L i t er a r y P er i o d s M at t er ed

Why Liter ary Periods Mat tered Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies Ted Underwood

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Underwood, Ted, author Why literary periods mattered : historical contrast and the prestige of English studies / Ted Underwood. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-8446-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literature—Periodization. 2. English literature—Study and teaching— History. 3. English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Title pr25.u53 2013 2013010532 820.9—dc23 Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion isbn 978-0-8047-8844-1 (Electronic)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of Literary Culture

vii

1

1 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790–1819

17

2 The Invention of Historical Perspective

55

3 The Invention of the Period Survey Course

81

4 The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization, and a Forgotten Challenge to It (1886–1949)

114

5 Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status Anxieties of Historicism in the 1990s

136

6 Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History

157

Notes

177

Index

195

Acknowledgments

T

took a decade to write and went through major changes, so many of the people mentioned here may not recognize their contribution to its current form. But at various stages of composition, I relied on advice from Nancy Armstrong, Marshall Brown, Walter Cohen, Anne Frey, Andrew Goldstone, Lauren Goodlad, Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Bob Markley, Jan Mieszkowski, David Suchoff, Matt Wilkens, Paul Westover, and Gillen Wood. Emily-Jane Cohen and Adam Potkay gave particularly crucial kinds of advice that reshaped the structure of the book. Eleanor Courtemanche listened to the whole argument as it evolved, and reminded me of evidence I was overlooking or suppressing. The third chapter would have been impossible to write without assistance from the College Archives of University College, London, and King’s College, London; travel to those archives was supported by a William and Flora Hewlett International Research Travel Grant. Parts of Chapter  appeared earlier in Representations; some paragraphs in Chapter  appeared earlier in PMLA. The ideas in Chapter  were aired first in Philosophy and Culture, edited by Rei Terada for Romantic Praxis. Composition of the book was supported by sabbaticals from Colby College and from the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. John Unsworth deserves special acknowledgment for encouraging me to explore digital modes of literary research; without that encouragement, his book

vii

viii Acknowledgments

Chapter  would not exist. The collection used in Chapter  incorporates texts from ECCO-TCP and the Brown Women Writers’ Project, as well as a collection of two thousand nineteenth-century works that Jordan Sellers spent a year selecting. Harriett Green helped me gain access to many of these resources. Collaboration with Loretta Auvil and Boris Capitanu helped me analyze them. A version of the illustration in Chapter  appeared earlier in The Journal of Digital Humanities. Work on this portion of the project was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Where things digital are concerned, I should also credit Artificial Intelligence Atlanta, a small start-up that gave me my first programming job (in Prolog) some thirty years ago.

W h y L i t er a r y P er i o d s M at t er ed

Introduction Historical Contrast and the Prestige of Literary Culture

H

i s to r i e s o f l i t er a r y s t u dy tend to emphasize theoretical controversy. The subtitle of Gerald Graff’s influential Professing Literature may be An Institutional History, but even Graff’s book is in practice organized around methodological debate—notably the long debate between scholars and critics.1 Institutional structures occupy a smaller place in our model of the discipline, although some of those structures have turned out to be more durable than any theory. One of the most durable is periodization—an organizing principle that has shaped literary study for a century and a half. At most colleges and universities, courses that explore the literature of a single period (ranging in length from a decade to a century or more) remain the mainstay of the upper-division undergraduate curriculum. These “period surveys” can be traced back to the s, and as this book will strive to show, they embody a cultivating mission that decisively shaped vernacular literary history shortly after its emergence, predating Matthew Arnold’s better-known intervention in the discipline. In the early twentieth century, periodization began to organize professional development and research as well as teaching. Graduate students were trained to specialize in a period, and hired to teach courses in that period. By the middle of the twentieth century, scholars were attending period conferences and publishing in period journals. To see that other modes of professional organization are conceivable, one has only to glance at the discipline of history itself, where the looser concept of “area” occupies the institutional role that periods occupy in literary studies. Areas often cover a longer span of time than a literary period would: a his 1

2 Introduction

torian of science, or East Asia, for instance, may regularly teach courses that cover several centuries. But more importantly, even when historians’ areas of specialization cover a relatively brief span of time, the temporal period tends to be secondary to a topic or problem that defines it. A historian might identify as a scholar of “British imperialism,” for instance, where literary scholars identify as “Victorianists” or “modernists.” The contrast between literary studies and history may suggest that periodization is a by-product of professional specialization. It is true that present-day literature departments tend to have more faculty covering certain parts of the world than departments of history do. But the imperatives of professional specialization cannot explain the nineteenth-century emergence of a periodized curriculum. Period surveys preceded professional specialization by almost fifty years. They emerged in the s, in literature departments that contained only one or two professors, who usually had to abandon the goal of synoptic coverage in order to make room for courses tightly focused on individual periods. Moreover, invoking specialization would not explain why periodization has so long remained the dominant mode of specialization in literary studies, instead of giving way to some other mode of specialization organized around a more properly literary category, like genre. Periodization has endured in a discipline where almost nothing else does, and has endured not just in broad outline but in detail. One can open course catalogs from the late nineteenth century and find courses on “English Romanticism” and “Elizabethan Drama” that have been offered with essentially the same titles for a hundred and twenty years, while philology, the history of ideas, New Criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and New Historicism came and went.2 Of course, the content of these courses was transformed whenever one methodology gave way to another. Different theoretical schools have defined the purpose of literary study in fundamentally different ways. But this is just what seems remarkable: the persistence of an organizing grid that is able to survive repeated, sweeping transformation of its content. Since professors have apparently felt free to change everything about their courses except the periodizing title, one begins to suspect that the value of literary study, in the eyes of students and of society at large, has been durably bound up with its ability to define cultural moments and contrast them against each other. That is the suspicion this book explores: I will argue that an organizing

Introduction 3

principle of historical contrast has been central to the prestige of AngloAmerican literary culture since the early nineteenth century, although its authority is now in decline. Two phrases in that sentence may need to be unpacked. “The prestige of literary culture” encompasses claims about literature’s cultivating influence on readers both inside and outside the academy. Historical contrast was already becoming central to models of literary culture in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, before vernacular literary history had become a university subject. The phrase “historical contrast” is deliberately chosen for a similar breadth of reference. “Periodization” tends to evoke an academic and almost scholastic debate about boundaries—are they real or only nominal?—which may not have great significance. It is true that time is a continuum, and also true that it can be useful to divide a continuum. And perhaps literary periodization is now becoming nothing more than that sort of mathematical abstraction. But periodization did not acquire institutional power in literary studies for reasons of mathematical convenience. What matters more than boundary-drawing is the broader premise that literature’s power to cultivate readers depends on vividly particularizing and differentiating vanished eras, contrasting them implicitly against the present as well as against each other. It’s a premise bound up with broader assumptions about literature’s power to mediate historical change and transmute it into community—or in other words, with a model of literary culture. This book investigates the emergence of that model, and then asks what might replace it if (as I would argue) the authority of historical contrast has in recent decades been declining. Most studies of this topic have been preoccupied with the significance of specific period concepts, rather than the significance of contrast as such. Much has been written, for instance, about the construction of “Gothic” alterity, or about the logic of “uneven development” that coordinates timelines in different parts of the world. I hope to preserve the central insights of those studies. For instance, it is important that European historicism has been shaped both by a peculiar relationship to classical antiquity, and by a colonialist impulse to map other regions of the world onto a European past.3 But on the whole, I will be less interested in particular period concepts or even systems of periodization than in the changing cultural functions of contrast itself. The first few chapters of this study focus on eighteenth and earlynineteenth-century Britain. Similar developments could be traced in other

4 Introduction

national contexts, but I have focused on British literature both because I know it well, and because the historical novels of Walter Scott played a central role in popularizing a model of literary culture organized by historical contrast. (Scott’s influence on the European novel is well known, but he also had an influence on universities: the professors who designed the first period survey courses, for instance, were seeking to recreate Scott’s model of historical imagination in the classroom.) The later chapters of this study expand beyond Britain to consider the role historical contrast played in the nineteenthcentury European novel, and in twentieth-century Anglo-American literary education, as well as fiction and film. This expansion of scope is not, of course, meant to suggest that other nations simply adopted a British model of historical cultivation. Although Scott’s influence was international, other nations were in fact already developing their own ways of valuing historical contrast, inflected by their own histories, class structures, and definitions of national identity. In a single volume, it is not possible to survey the full complexity of that story even within Europe. I can only pause occasionally to mark points of divergence. For instance, Chapter  considers why the concept of historical “perspective” took a different shape in the United States than it did in the United Kingdom. But even after acknowledging those differences, many points of similarity remain, and it is possible to trace a broadly shared trajectory in English-language literary culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Prestige of Historical Contrast, – Awareness of historical discontinuity was not a specifically literary invention. The larger eighteenth-century insight we call “historicism” entailed a recognition that different ages were separated by profoundly different, perhaps mutually incomprehensible, modes of life and thought. The contribution that poets, novelists, and eventually critics made was to propose that literature had a unique ability to render discontinuity imaginable and meaningful. It achieved this not by reducing different eras to some common standard, but by dramatizing the vertiginous gulfs between eras, and then claiming vertigo itself as a source of meaning. This paradox has become so familiar that modern readers may take it for granted, but looked at squarely, the strategy is an odd one. John Keats hinted, for instance, that his encounter with Homer became all the more sublime because ignorance of Greek forced him to snatch glimpses through a veil of translation, allowing only a “wild surmise” about the Homeric

Introduction 5

world beyond.4 William Wordsworth suggested that London’s power over his heart depended not on any particular memorial or “distinct remembrance,” but on his own inability to master a bewildering “weight of ages” made up of “shapes, and forms, and tendencies to shape / That shift and vanish, change and interchange / Like spectres—ferment quiet and sublime.”5 I mention these passages from Keats and Wordsworth because they are vivid, brief, and may be familiar to some readers. But romantic-era poets were not the only writers who sought to grasp history’s authority in the negative form of bewildering discontinuity. This strategy emerged along with historicism itself in the eighteenth century, and became as important to novelists as it was to poets. In the realist historical novel, historical bewilderment famously takes the form of a protagonist’s blindness to his or her own involvement in historical change. But this ironic depiction of historical blindness was often bound up with an imaginative undercurrent hinting that the understanding denied to consciousness might return in dizzying glimpses of historical contrast, represented in the narrative (more or less playfully) as déjà vu or ancestral memory. These undercurrents are well known in the so-called idealist novels of George Sand, but they can also be traced in writers celebrated for realism, like Walter Scott and Leo Tolstoy.6 As in the poetic examples from Keats and Wordsworth, the protagonists of these novels are denied a coherent, synoptic overview of history, but acquire instead—and paradoxically through their very ignorance—a sense of perspective that depends on contrast. The model of historical cultivation that emphasized discontinuity and contrast was not limited to literature; it shaped historiography and historical education as well. Chapter  traces some of the consequences of that model for popular historical writing in the early nineteenth century, focusing especially on the way the principle of contrast was bound up with ideas about the acquisition of “historical perspective.” The metaphor of perspective implicitly accepts that historical knowledge is limited, and proposes to orient readers by tracing selected differential relations instead of attempting exhaustive coverage. The limitation tacitly implied by that metaphor was literalized visually (as single-point perspective, shading, and foreshortening) in early nineteenth-century timelines.7 In universities, however, a strongly contrastive, periodized model of cultivation has shaped literary study even more deeply and enduringly than it shaped the discipline of history itself. Since this difference between literary and historical education has persisted for many years, there are several valid

6 Introduction

ways of explaining it, with different degrees of relevance to different periods. For instance, it is fair to observe that political and social historians have spent more time than literary critics trying to untangle causal questions, which don’t fit easily into a contrastive framework. Moreover, as Chapter  will show, twentieth-century literary critics embraced a contrastive, periodized model of their discipline in part explicitly to differentiate themselves from historians. But in the early nineteenth century, the study of literary history acquired its contrastive orientation most immediately from literature itself. Poets and novelists had for several decades been representing literary cultivation specifically as the acquisition of a historical sense that enriched the present through brief glimpses of an alien past. The best-selling author of the era— Walter Scott—was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized historical moments in intimate social detail, and the English professors who introduced period survey courses to universities in the s modeled their new courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment. Chapter  traces this connection, focusing particularly on Frederick Denison Maurice, who has a number of well-known achievements (helping to found Queen’s College, for instance, and Christian Socialism), but has so far received little or no credit for his most decisive contribution to literary study. Maurice designed the first period survey courses at King’s College, London. The purpose of the new courses was to give present-day students an empathic connection to some particular moment of the national past—or as he put it, to “bring the townsman of one age to feel himself connected with the townsman of another.”8 “Townsman,” here, is the English equivalent of “bourgeois,” and Maurice’s plan for periodized literary education was specifically addressed to the English middle classes. He argued that studying discrete moments of the national past would give the middle classes a sense of national pride equivalent to aristocratic inheritance. This plan would be fascinating on intellectual grounds alone. Since it actually led to the creation of a curricular institution that continues to organize present-day departments of English, it is an understatement to say that it deserves to be more widely discussed. Even the few words I’ve said about Maurice above make clear, I hope, that periodization is bound up in his thought with a complex set of ideas about class and nationality. But the story has several further twists. Maurice was an Anglican theologian as well as a literary historian, and there was a clear parallel between the educational value he attributed to discrete historical periods and an unconventional theory of immortality he advanced that made eternal life depend on the timelessness

Introduction 7

of individual moments of experience. To cap the story off, this theory of immortality was branded a heresy by conservative Anglicans, and led to his dismissal from King’s College. In Chapter , I’ll have more to say about the particular philological, religious, and political motives that converged in Maurice’s work. Here I only want to pause to underline two aspects of his thought that typify the broader social significance of historical contrast in the early nineteenth century: his suggestion that periodized contrast might provide a middle-class alternative to aristocratic distinction, and his implicit analogy between periodization and immortality. Emphasis on historical discontinuity has shaped the humanities so strongly that our accounts of this theme tend to be strongly normative, pitting the universalizing Enlightenment against romantic historicists who finally discover that different ages understand the world in different ways.9 Without denying the validity of historicist insights, I want to complicate normative accounts of this transition by emphasizing that the “discovery” of historical contrast was also socially motivated. Edmund Burke was by no means the first person to realize that the authority of the aristocracy was bound up with their claim to represent historical continuity. As Wolfram Schmidgen has argued, landed property conferred authority in part because the manorial estate was thought to embody collective continuity, and was in fact legally defined as a product of continuity over time.10 If different periods had incommensurable assumptions that made sense only for a given time, then the concept of continuity would be a mirage, and no title or moss-grown manor could claim to embody the collective past. In this sense, the periodized, contrastive model of history that emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century can be understood as a tacit attack on the logic of aristocratic distinction. Just as importantly, historical contrast advanced an alternative model of distinction. Cultural prestige had been in the early eighteenth century imperfectly distinguished from other forms of social status: the cultural value of a literary work could often be judged by the same standards of correctness and polish that governed, say, elocution or manners. The late eighteenthcentury attack on “classicism” addressed this, as Trevor Ross has observed, by attempting to define autonomous standards of specifically cultural value.11 Moreover, to ensure that culture would remain autonomous, critics defined conformity to prevailing social standards as a positive flaw. The sources of social prestige were thus disqualified, at least in principle, from exercising a

8 Introduction

monopoly over cultural prestige. For instance, Alexander Pope could never stand in the first rank of English writers, according to Joseph Warton, because he “stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners because they are familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse.”12 This remark may pose as an attack on the manners that happen to prevail at the time of composition—as if to say, “manners have become so uniform lately!” But an objection to the uniformity of contemporary topics is, in practice, an objection to contemporaneity as such. To describe varied, unfamiliar manners, poets would have to range across varied, unfamiliar eras. Warton affirms poetry’s autonomy from contemporary social standards, in other words, by insisting that the proper subject of poetry is historical difference. This strategy is a recurring theme in late-eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century literature, and I’ll argue that it was the primary reason why historical contrast became central to the period’s definition of culture. Disorienting visions of a remote past became paradigmatic instances of literary imagination because they illustrated, better than any other subject could, that literary prestige was distinct from the traditional sources of social prestige. Of course, Charlotte Smith’s visions on Beachy Head, or William Wordsworth’s on Salisbury Plain, could be said to invoke “tradition” inasmuch as they use fragmentary glimpses of the past to elicit reverential feelings toward history itself. But if this is a tradition, it is one that cannot be transmitted or inherited.13 In fact, the reverential feeling that gives it power is bound up with a disorienting failure of continuity—a trick that would eventually allow a lower-middle-class writer like Keats to appropriate Hellenic glory by insisting that he cannot read Greek and is made despairingly dizzy by the Elgin Marbles.14 Compared to a twenty-first-century model of cultural authority that emphasizes the up-to-date as such, this may appear conservative. But in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context, defining cultural authority around historical discontinuity advanced the interests of middle-class intellectuals. The authority of the collective past could now be appropriated in a negative way, by articulating your own distance from it. The social implications of this gesture may be disguised by the spiritual imagery that surrounds it in nineteenth-century literature, where historical contrast is often dramatized as visionary disorientation, or déjà vu, or even as a troubling past-life memory. This is not the rhetoric one ordinarily associates with middle-class self-assertion. But the political character of this

Introduction 9

spiritualism begins to make sense if we approach the concept of immortality from a Durkheimian perspective. For Emile Durkheim, religion was a way of grappling with the social dimension of human existence—a dimension that can never adequately be externalized as a “relationship” between individual and society, since collective feelings are always present within us, and are indeed among our first, most personal, and most powerful emotions. Thus people are led to imagine society “in the form of a moral power that, while immanent in us, also represents something in us that is other than ourselves.”15 The idea of the soul acknowledges this internalization of collective life; to claim an immortal soul, for Durkheim, is in effect to claim the perpetuity of collective life as a personal possession. On this account, it becomes a little easier to understand why a struggle to redefine the authority of tradition might take the form of visionary speculation about new forms of immortality. I would argue that the nineteenth-century discourse of historical spiritualism was at once a struggle between social classes and a genuinely religious meditation. Historicism unsettled existing assumptions about the perpetuity of collective life, and thus challenged immortality at its very root. Of course, skeptical questions had always been posed both about heaven and about the earthly immortality of fame—but these forms of skepticism could never uproot the sentiment of immortality, since individual afterlives are merely ways of imagining, and personalizing, the deeper persistence of community itself. One could acknowledge that the “gilded monuments / Of princes” are “besmeared with sluttish time” without losing that deeper sense of continuity.16 Historicism posed a more fundamental challenge, by demonstrating that all communities eventually become unrecognizable to themselves. James Macpherson’s illiterate Celtic heroes are perfectly (and anachronistically) clear-eyed on this subject. “We shall pass away like a dream,” his king Fingal admits. “No sound will be in the fields of our battles. Our tombs will be lost in the heath. The hunter shall not know the place of our rest.”17 Fingal envisions the loss not of an individual monument but of the collective context that gave it meaning. But these pagan warriors somehow absorb enough of their author’s eighteenth-century historicism to look forward to haunting the future as ghostly otherness—as “the race that are no more” and “the song of other years” (, ). Implicit in this plan is an acknowledgment that the past lives on, not through continuous tradition, but through the social changes that transform it into something memorably dated.

10 Introduction

This is to be sure an odd vision of immortality—one that locates collective permanence not in a church, in posterity, or in a vector of progress, but rather in moments of mutual incomprehension that would appear to undermine all permanence. It may be difficult to believe that a faith of this paradoxical kind could be felt deeply enough to deserve comparison to ordinary heavenly immortality. To address this doubt I’m inclined simply to quote Walter Pater’s justifiably famous description of the Mona Lisa: All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there . . . the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.18

Lady Lisa seems to become immortal through aesthetic cultivation: her weary familiarity with different times and places somehow makes her one with the perpetuity of human civilization itself. But how does that happen? What does it mean to “sweep” together different modes of life or “sum” them up in oneself? We might suppose that it involves a dialectic, or progress, but that’s a supposition without a great deal of support in Pater’s imagery, or in the anaphoric structure of his long sentences, which emphasize instead sheer diversity of experience. Lady Lisa resembles the Paterian aesthete who seeks “to define beauty, not in the abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it” (vii–viii). In other words, she seems to mine immortality somehow from the specific contrasts between Greece and Rome, between “the mysticism of the middle age” and “the sins of the Borgias.” In this respect, I would suggest, she is a typical instance of the way nineteenth-century writers, and professors of literature, turned

Introduction 11

historical contrast itself into a substitute for older models of immortality (and community) that had been undermined by historicism. This is not an argument about secularization. I would not argue that this new model of immortality, founded on contrast, was inherently either more or less religious than an older model of immortality expressed in terms of, say, fame or tradition. The change this book traces runs perpendicular to the religious/secular axis: it involves a shift from a model of collective time premised on continuity, to one that dramatized the collective dimension of time by dramatizing discontinuity and multiplicity. Since “discontinuity” sounds less reassuring than “continuity,” it might seem as though this shift would necessarily have demystifying, secularizing implications. But that would be a misguided assumption. In the nineteenth century, challenges to historical continuity led not only to the emergence of a periodized literary curriculum, but, for instance, to the emergence of dispensational fundamentalism—a religious movement that departed from older exegetical traditions by arguing that Scripture was radically heterogenous. Since God had made different promises to different periods, the millennial promises made to Israel could no longer be conflated (as Christian tradition had long assumed) with later promises to the Christian Church. As I have argued at length elsewhere, these fundamentalists advanced exegetical premises that have a fair claim to be called historicist.19 But in the case of dispensational fundamentalism, historicist emphasis on discontinuity did not lead to any kind of secularization. It led instead to deep suspicion of secular civil society, and to the modern doctrine of a pre-tribulational Rapture (which served in effect as an alternate Christian apocalypse once the earthly millennium had been returned to the Jews). This is a fascinating story in its own right, but I mention it here simply to illustrate that there is nothing about the idea of historical discontinuity that inherently disrupts orthodoxy. In the nineteenth century it did give middle-class intellectuals an alternative to the logic of collective inheritance that had supported aristocratic prestige, but that effect needs to be understood as a specific and narrowly targeted one.

The Prestige of Periodized Contrast, – The first three chapters of this book try to understand how the prestige of literary culture became increasingly dependent on historical contrast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through historical contrast, writers

12 Introduction

defined a sense of collective permanence that could coexist with the radical transformations envisioned by historicism; at the same time, they advanced a model of cultural distinction that thrived on discontinuity and seemed independent of inherited status. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, this model of culture was institutionalized in education, as a periodized curriculum came to dominate vernacular literary study in colleges and universities. The final three chapters of this book ask why that model of literary culture endured so long, and why it may have finally begun to lose its authority. In Chapter , I investigate the curious stability of the periodized curriculum. The range of works taught in universities certainly expanded in the twentieth century, but the organizing principles of nationality and period remained remarkably unshaken through a long series of controversies about the purpose of literary education. Stability of this kind hints at some underlying social function that endured while intellectual rationales changed around it. But the social pressures that shaped literary historicism in the nineteenth century—for instance, a tension between aristocratic and middleclass conceptions of tradition—can hardly also have sustained it through the twentieth. To better understand the durability of the periodized curriculum, I explore one of the most effective challenges to periodization, all the more interesting since it is now largely forgotten—the ambitious project of comparative literature in America between  and . Today, the comparisons implied by “comparative” literature are usually synchronic and international. So we might expect this project to have challenged nationalism rather than periodization. But before , comparative literature differed from traditional literary study not just in its international scope but in its very purpose. Instead of characterizing individual works or movements, comparatists sought to produce a general anthropological theory of literary development. This could have implied a fundamentally different approach to literary education, and the seeds of a new approach are evident in early-twentieth-century course catalogs, which began to reframe period surveys as studies of “development” and “transition.” But this challenge to periodization proved short-lived, and the reasons for its failure are illuminating. In the s and s, resistance to the new disciplinary model was expressed vaguely as a suspicion that fact-mongering comparative literary historians were neglecting literature’s cultivating power. The rationale for

Introduction 13

this suspicion was later articulated more clearly by René Wellek, who argued that representing literary history as a causal, continuous process could undermine the cultural authority of literature by assimilating it to social history. Division into discrete periods ensured the autonomy of literary study because it prevented literature from becoming an object of merely causal investigation. Wellek was of course just one (influential) voice in a heterogenous discipline. There were other scholars who remained committed to interdisciplinary connections and to causal explanation. But the salient fact about twentieth-century curricular history is that a wide range of heterodoxies flourished intellectually without having much enduring effect on the structure of the curriculum. Wellek’s disciplinary argument helps explain why. From the s through the end of the century, period concepts seemed intellectually debatable but practically indispensable for the identity of the discipline. In situations of that kind, “practically indispensable” tends to carry the day. Although periodization still organizes literature departments institutionally, it may no longer seem to have important intellectual consequences. Certainly, if we expect scholars to hold forth confidently about “the animating spirit of each age” or “the essential qualities which differentiate one period from another”—as Reuben P. Halleck did in — we will be disappointed.20 But the degree of change could be overstated. For one thing, the tone of pedagogy has changed less than the tone of scholarship: the introductions to anthologies are still devoted to articulating “the essential qualities which differentiate one period from another.” Moreover, it is not necessary to prove that the boundaries and character of each period can be positively defined in order to affirm the importance of periodized contrast. It is only necessary to show that attempts to trace general laws or long developmental arcs are doomed to failure. That negative premise has remained an absolutely central theme of literary scholarship, shared by a range of different theoretical schools. One can discern it, for instance, in Michel Foucault’s critique of “continuous history.”21 It is not hard to understand why Foucault’s attempt to replace the tracing of causes with a “genealogy” that thrives on rupture was received more eagerly in literary studies than in his home discipline. Foucault’s critique of continuity dovetailed neatly with literary historians’ long-established preference for contrast. The same preference can be traced in theories that seem remote from Foucault: for instance, in Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, which similarly sidelined

14 Introduction

sequence and causality in order to reimagine influence as a contrastive, agonistic structure. In short, the authority of historical discontinuity has not declined notably inside literature departments. It remains important not only in the institutional form of periodization, but in the negative form of an assumption that theories premised on continuous change are somehow tame, conservative, or recuperative. Where the discipline of literary studies itself is concerned, this assumption neatly reverses the actual social logic of historicism. The prestige of the discipline has long depended on the ruptures that separate periods and movements; literary critics’ collective habit of talking about “rupture” and “fragmentation” as if they still posed a thrilling challenge to literary culture is at this point (collectively) disingenuous. This failure of selfunderstanding has been particularly visible in critical conversation about postmodern historicity. When critics suggest that postmodernism is reducing history to “heaps of fragments,” they rarely seem very genuinely troubled by the possibility.22 In Chapter , I’ll argue that the prestige of literary culture has been threatened in recent decades not by fragmentation, but by an assumption that prevailing modes of (liberal, capitalist) social organization represent an inevitable, more-or-less stable culmination of human history. That is not an assumption supported by any evidence, but it matters less as a factual claim than as a tacit premise of popular historical consciousness. Against that backdrop, literary discussions of fragmentation feel more wistful than anxious; they express nostalgia for an era when the contrasts between cultural movements and periods could still seem to dramatize real, competing social alternatives. This nostalgia surrounding discontinuity became particularly visible in the conceit of “parallel lives” that characterized plays, novels, and films of the late s and s (perhaps most famously, A. S. Byatt’s Possession). In this subgenre, threats to humanistic culture turn into fantasies specifically about historical discontinuity, which is both threatened by and rescued by the eerie parallel between historically distinct layers of the narrative. The analysis of recent literature, film, and cultural theory in Chapter  suggests that the waning prestige of historical contrast may be one important source of the crisis of confidence that has troubled literary studies for roughly a quarter-century. For literary scholars, the value of historical contrast is still a fundamental intellectual premise, as well as a primary mode of disciplinary

Introduction 15

organization. But outside the academy, it is no longer clear that students need to be taught to recognize periods or differentiate artistic movements from each other. This crisis is commonly interpreted as a consequence of the waning prestige of literature in an age of digital media—and there may be some truth to that interpretation. But writing has experienced radical shifts of form and medium before. When poetry seemed to be displaced by the novel, or Greek and Latin by vernacular literature, the shift prompted passionate debate about the course of literary history, making literary questions only more central to public life. If cultural history itself now seems to be losing value, it may be because the present crisis involves not merely a transformation of media, but a change in the structure of historical cultivation. Perhaps René Wellek was right to imagine that the boundary between cultural and social history depended on a distinctively cultural approach to the problem of change—a rhetoric of contrast that gave great works and artistic movements not only an explanatory function but a permanent exemplary value. That approach to cultural history has been undermined on several levels—in the academy by social materialism, and in popular consciousness by a confident presentism that reduces the past to retro style. Nothing I have said above implies that literature departments will stop teaching period survey courses—or that they should. Although this book explores the institutional history behind literary historicism, it doesn’t aim to reduce historicist ideas to mere symptoms. Ideas can be at once socially constructed and valid. In this case, it is after all true that human societies differ radically from each other. Period concepts may no longer convey the cultural authority they once did, but students still need to discover how thoroughly historical differences can reshape the experienced world. Given that pedagogical end, contrast is an appropriate means, and contrast probably implies some system of chronological boundaries. So I see no reason to assume that literary periods themselves will disappear. On the other hand, any institution that persists for more than a hundred years necessarily produces a few blind spots. If the cultural authority of periodization is now waning, that poses a challenge for the humanities—but perhaps also an opportunity to take a fresh look at old questions. The final chapter of this volume argues that literary studies’ long reliance on a rhetoric of contrast has in fact left the discipline with blind spots that scholars are now free to address. I focus on initiatives associated with the rubric of “digital

16 Introduction

humanities.” The introduction of quantitative methods in literary history is controversial for a host of reasons, but I would argue that it matters above all because it opens up new ways of characterizing gradual change, and thereby makes it possible to write a literary history that is no longer bound to a differentiating taxonomy of authors, periods, and movements. Critics of quantitative methods might express this more negatively by saying that those methods threaten the differentiating, individualizing principle that makes literary scholarship humanistic. I don’t expect this book to resolve the debate. But I do want to propose that it should be interpreted as a debate about the historical dimension of literary cultivation. Distant reading is not troubling to literary scholars because we resist the numeric as such. After all, critics have long counted sales figures and numbers of editions. Graphing macroscopic trends is troubling, more fundamentally, because it challenges the principle of contrast that has long distinguished literary culture from the forms of learning purveyed by other disciplines.

1

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M

nineteenth-century historical novels lend history an ironic grandeur by dramatizing characters’ inability to perceive the historical dimension of the events that surround them. Walter Scott’s Edward Waverley attends a hunting party in the Highlands—only to discover a week later, when he is accused of treason, that the hunting party was in fact the beginning of a Jacobite rebellion. In Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrizio wanders through the fields of Waterloo, buying and losing horses, shooting men and being shot at, trying vainly to locate a battle. War and Peace elevates this kind of dramatic irony into a prescriptive theory of history: “In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in a historic event never understands its significance.”1 Critics of the novel place a high value on these ironies. But they have interpreted them in radically different ways. For Georg Lukács, the sidelining of individual protagonists marked a crucial stage in the novel’s approximation to Marxism. “What matters . . . in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events.”2 The unplanned entanglements of Scott’s “mediocre heroes” foreground these social forces, while marginalizing the sort of historical narrative that celebrates fateful individual choice. Approaching the topic from a different perspective, Nicola Chiaromonte concluded that the opacity of history in the nineteenth-century novel was an early symptom a n y o f t h e b e s t- k n o w n

17

18 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819

of the century’s waning confidence that history had any humanly accessible meaning—providential, Hegelian, or otherwise. What Lukács interpreted as proto-Marxist popular history, Chiaromonte interpreted as a harbinger of “the collapse of socialism.”3 Given the philosophical differences that separated these two readers, it is not surprising that they attributed different kinds of significance to the nineteenth-century historical novel. But it is a little surprising that they chose to locate those diametrically opposed truths in the same aspect of the form—in the protagonist’s inability to grasp the historical significance of the plot. Critics have consistently been drawn to this blind spot, which gives aesthetic form to the basic historicist insight that individual perspectives are constituted by a social structure that may not itself be visible. But critics have consistently read that insight as an expression of the principles that shape their own methodology. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, traced Tolstoy’s theory of history back to a skeptical reaction against the optimism of Enlightenment historiography. Wolfgang Iser discovered in Scott what one might call a reader-response theory of history, in which “eye-witnesses bring to life only their own particular section of the fading past, so that each account clearly presents only one aspect of reality and never the whole.”4 More recently, Ina Ferris has correlated the formation of the historical novel (and the national tale) with a debate that pitted the “official” history of “great public events” against the unreadable traces of social history and local memory. 5 There is, in short, a broad critical consensus that the historical novel’s emphasis on opacity and necessary blindness enacts an important insight about representation of the past—but no consensus at all about the insight it is supposed to enact. This chapter will not offer yet another account of that insight. On the contrary, I’ll argue that there is less epistemological insight to explain than critics have generally assumed, because versions of the dramatic irony that critics appreciate in Scott and Stendhal already darkened the earlier works of Ann Radcliffe and Lady Morgan. In Gothic novels, the collective past is already as opaque as it will become in historical novels. In national tales, it is already evident that protagonists are caught up in a larger story whose contours exceed their individual field of vision. What changes between  and  is not that writers discover a newly skeptical theory of social experience—but rather that the mysterious opacity of the collective past (previously embodied in landed property) is transposed onto personal historical cultivation. To

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put this more pointedly: early-nineteenth-century novelists didn’t have to invent a historicist aesthetic, they just had to show that it could serve as a foundation for middle-class cultural distinction. As we’ll see in Chapters  and , the limited, perspectival knowledge of history in Scott’s novels later became a model for the first period survey courses. So by assigning a peculiar prestige to half-knowledge of history, novelists like Radcliffe, Morgan, and Scott were also, unwittingly, building a foundation for the cultural authority of periodization in English departments. Since “history” and “the collective past” may sound like synonyms, I should explain what I mean by the latter phrase, which will be used here in a broader sense. One of the salient characteristics of social existence is that it takes place on a temporal scale larger than individual life. A group existed before any of its members were born, and it generally continues in some form after they die. When I talk about the “collective past,” or “collective time,” I am referring simply to the way social life is set off from individual experience by this difference of scale, whether the collective past is embodied in institutions and inherited property, dramatized as myth and ritual, or narrated as history. Because the larger temporal scale of collective life is one of the primary ways a group transcends its members, the symbols of collective time have often doubled as symbols of public authority. As Zygmunt Bauman observes, “long and carefully recorded pedigrees are significant through setting the scions of long and known lineages apart from the commoners who cannot trace their ancestors beyond a second or third generation . . . For similar reasons, the splendour of old, inherited riches can never be matched by the glitter of brand-new fortune.”6 In early modern Britain, legal authority depended quite explicitly on this reification of collective time. Birth and inherited property conveyed authority because they actually contained the past. This was particularly true, as Wolfram Schmidgen has shown, of the manorial estate. According to Edward Coke’s Compleate Copy-Holder (), for instance, copy-hold estates were so intimately dependent on custom that they contained time itself as a life-giving soul. [T]ime is the mother, or rather the nurse of manors; time is the soule that giveth life to every Manor, without which a Manor decayeth and dieth [. . .] . Hence it is that the King himselfe cannot create a perfect Manor at this day, for such things as receive their perfection by the continuance of time, come not within the compasse of a Kings Prerogative . . . neither can the King create

20 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819

any new custome, nor doe any thing that amounteth to the creation of a new custome [. . .] .

For this reason it is important for Coke to show that “the self-same form of manors remains unaltered in substance” since the Normans, and perhaps even the Saxons.7 It would be a misunderstanding to suppose that, by gesturing at the Normans, Coke is invoking the authority of “history.” As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, our habit of invoking the past as “history”—using the word to mean not merely a genre of writing, but the whole course of human events— is a late-eighteenth-century innovation. It became possible to use the word that way only after the discourse of universal history had popularized the assumption that all human societies, past and present, were linked together by the gradual “realisation of a hidden plan of nature” (to quote Kant).8 In Edward Coke’s time, the authority of history was imagined less abstractly. “Historia” was “magistra vitae” simply because books of history contained a storehouse of discrete examples: admirable models and salutary warnings that might guide a reader.9 But in most circumstances of daily life it was, of course, impractical to consult a written account. The broader authority of the past was therefore called “custom” or “antiquity,” and it did not have to be borrowed from historians. The collective past was rather embodied in a wide range of living institutions. The Church was a fellowship of the dead and the living stretching back to Christ. The antiquity of a community was visible in the graveyard and, as Coke takes pains to show, it constituted legal authority in the manorial estate. Wolfram Schmidgen’s study of “the law of property” argues that community, legal authority, and time remained embedded in novelistic descriptions of things (descriptions of land especially, but also other kinds of property) through the end of the eighteenth century. Schmidgen concludes by suggesting that in Radcliffe (and more decisively in Scott) this symbolic fusion of time, space, and community began to give way to “the individualized, privatized, and reified outlook of modern capitalism,” which disavows the embedding of social relations in things. I agree with Schmidgen’s account (and have already been specifically indebted to his interpretation of Edward Coke) but I want to look more closely at the end of the process he describes, because Schmidgen’s account would seem to contradict the critical consensus I summarized at the beginning of this chapter. Schmidgen’s reading of Waverley suggests that Scott separated time from the estate by insisting on the visibility

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21

of discrete symbols of the past. “While the common law’s construction of legitimacy relies on the assumption that not everything that can be known is visible, Waverley’s description of landed property sponsors an epistemology that equates the knowable with the visible.” The past is therefore reduced to a visible token—for instance, to the famous portrait of Edward Waverley in Highland dress that gets added to the walls of Tully-Veolan.10 This reading precisely reverses a prevailing narrative about the historical novel. As I began the chapter by noting, many scholars have argued that Scott advanced realism by discovering that “history” is as invisible and as ubiquitous as the air. Schmidgen claims that Scott reified the past by making it visible, where Lukacs and Iser suggested that his innovation was to make history disappear. What explains this contradiction? I tend to think the question of visibility, as such, is a red herring. There was a robust consensus among novelists, from Ann Radcliffe through George Eliot, that the temporal dimension of community was concealed from the casual observer. But different genres and discourses defined the hidden temporal dimension of community differently. Eighteenth-century novelists had envisioned collective time as embedded in places and things—pre-eminently, in the manorial estate. But as Gothic novels were displaced by national tales, and eventually by historical novels, the customary authority of property was treated increasingly as an empty sign. This is not quite to say that the past was condensed, as Schmidgen suggests, into visible artefacts or museum exhibits.11 Rather, nineteenthcentury novelists began to imply that the really important, invisible part of collective time was located in the minds of their characters—although only, perhaps, as a slumbering potential, which the events of the narrative would have to awaken and develop. The central effect of this change, I will argue, was to shift the authority of the collective past away from landed property and toward personal cultivation. In this way, the national tale and historical novel participate in a larger romantic-era argument that systematically redefined a whole range of virtues (independence, for instance) so that they could be possessed not just by landowners but by urban professionals and entrepreneurs. Personal cultivation gives characters access to the collective past most transparently when it takes the form of historical learning, and romanticera novelists did find a host of ingenious ways to make historical learning drive a plot. Characters discover old manuscripts, study inscriptions, clean gravestones, argue about Irish history, and claim to exhume Roman relics or

22 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819

buried treasure. But the connection between cultivation and history is just as frequently made in subtler ways, so that knowledge of poetry or natural philosophy can carry the same social weight as historical learning. To accomplish this, it is only necessary that the psychological depth characters reveal, when they are quoting Shakespeare or studying Irish botany, should eventually turn out to be temporal depth. It is only necessary that cultivation should produce eerie parallels, or dreams, or flashes of déjà vu, which connect present-day characters to an ancestral past, and reveal its persistence within them. To foreshadow, briefly, a topic that the fifth chapter of this book will tackle at more length: one of my reservations about the discourse of collective “memory” in recent criticism is that it has tended to overread the figurative differences between official history and this sort of déjà vu. “Memory” and “history” are often, in post-romantic writing, different names for a single fantasy—different ways of imagining collective time as something an individual can internalize. History becomes important in the romantic novel, in short, because it allows characters to internalize the authority of the past—previously embedded in institutions and property—as a portable attribute of character. This promotes the importance of historical cultivation in particular, but it is also a sign that learning in general was taking on a new social function. The logic that fostered this new function has been explored convincingly in Ernest Gellner’s account of the rise of nationalism. To sketch this briefly: in industrializing societies, education acquires an economic importance that eventually begins to shape collective identity. Ties of kinship and locality give up some of their economic significance in favor of the portable social capital that permits a worker to move from one occupation or location to another. As an (indirect) consequence of these shifts, there is growing pressure to identify the boundaries of the state with the boundaries of a distinctive national culture, and to imagine collective identity in terms of cultivation. This logic can confer a new social consequence even on forms of learning like botany and chemistry, which might not immediately seem national. But the new social centrality of learning is dramatized even more forcefully by literary and historical cultivation, which illustrate the spatial boundaries that separate each nation from others, as well as the temporal continuities that bind it to itself. The eighteenth-century expansion of historiography to encompass the history of manners and private life, as well as commerce and the arts, needs to be understood in this context: the shift from a strictly political to a cultural

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history parallels the rising economic significance of the “nation” vis-à-vis the “state.” To return, then, to the question that opened this chapter: What was the insight that permitted Scott—and other early historical novelists—to represent history as something invisible and ubiquitous? The question is badly formed because no special insight was needed. Eighteenth-century writers were already fascinated by the radical differences of scale that made it difficult for individual observers to grasp collective change; “historicism” is partly a name for growing consciousness of that blind spot. Eighteenthcentury novelists often embedded the mystery of the past in descriptions of landed property, representing houses and landscapes as palimpsests that record multiple overlapping layers of time. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the mystery of the past takes up residence in a different aspect of novelistic form. Instead of informing the setting, it moves gradually into character, where it manifests itself as a mode of cultivation that includes both knowledge of the past and eerie blindness to it. This chapter traces that process of translocation. In the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, I’ll argue, personal cultivation remains so intimately bound up with the obscure authority of landed property that it is difficult to distinguish the two. The relationship between property and culture in the national tale is more difficult to characterize, because one of the central projects of the genre is to rethink that relationship. The national tales of Lady Morgan, for instance, begin by linking national culture to the antiquity of property in a very Radcliffean way. But in Morgan’s later novels, property loses much of its symbolic power, and the grandeur of collective time is dramatized mainly by mysterious parallels that bind characters to their precursors in a remote era of Irish history. The chapter concludes by comparing two of Morgan’s novels to two of Scott’s published in the same period, to highlight the way both authors use their protagonists’ ignorance of the past to represent historical cultivation as a sublimely elusive distinction that transcends ordinary categories of class. In the late Regency period, the generic boundary between “national tales” and “historical novels” is often less important than this shared fantasy.

Decaying Castles and Cultural Distinction No reader of Ann Radcliffe will be surprised to learn that her novels emphasize architectural setting. Ruined abbeys and castles dominate her

24 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819

novels both by defining an atmosphere and by permitting reversals of fortune that hinge on the discovery of secret panels, disused chambers, and forgotten passageways to the sea. In this respect, Radcliffe typifies the late-eighteenthcentury beginnings of Gothic. As titles like The Recess () made plain well before Radcliffe, architectural obscurity was central to the genre. Birgitta Berglund points out that “the Gothic novel . . . came to be almost synonymous with ‘novel set in a (mysterious and menacing) Gothic building,’” and observes that more than a third of the books listed in a  prospectus from the Minerva Press mention a castle, abbey, or mansion house in their titles.12 But in Radcliffe, the “mysterious and menacing” face of Gothic architecture can be difficult to separate from the romance of gracefully decaying real estate. The “magnificent remains of a castle” have now become “admirably beautiful and picturesque”; the strongold “built on the summit of a rock” is located “in the most romantic part of the Highlands.”13 This tension between architecture’s archaic power and its present-day aesthetic value is enacted as well in Radcliffe’s plots, which have a way of transforming estates into prisons, and prisons into estates. For novels addressed to an audience of largely middle-class readers, this structure offered an important advantage: Radcliffe’s protagonists could acquire the connection to the past that distinguished the aristocracy while regretting the abuses of aristocratic power. Better yet, in many of Radcliffe’s novels, her protagonists acquire the first of these things precisely by suffering the second. In an attempt to escape from a decaying Gothic building where they have been unjustly imprisoned, they explore forgotten passages and stumble on relics that reveal their own claims to birth and property. The protagonist’s social ascent is often mediated by the discovery of a murdered or imprisoned parent—a mystery that of course invites psychological interpretation. Marilyn Butler has summed up the central action of Sicilian Romance and Romance of the Forest, for instance, as a “Freudian effort to recover the past,” stressing that the protagonist’s penetration “into the unknown recesses of a mysterious building” is also penetration “backward in time.” The protagonist discovers the forgotten, violent history of her own family by exploring a long-forgotten part of the building.14 But this psychological reading of architecture is entirely compatible with a reading that interprets Gothic settings materially, because the social significance of property was likewise felt to depend on violent secrets hidden in the past. In the late eighteenth century, the collective time contained in landed property could no longer be imagined as the inheritance of unchanging

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“custom” that Edward Coke had envisioned. It was plain, on the contrary, that the refinement of the gentry had been founded on its very opposite: on the rude manners of a primitive and violent era. The authority of the past thus turned out to depend on a disturbing incongruity. The thrill of this contrast is central to Radcliffe’s description of architecture. It is implicit in the tension between violent purpose and picturesque effect that defines her castles, and it sometimes becomes more explicit—for instance, in this passage from A Sicilian Romance: The view of this building revived in the mind of the beholder the memory of past ages. The manners and characters which distinguished them rose to his fancy, and through the long lapse of years he discriminated those customs and manners which formed so striking a contrast to the modes of his own times. The rude manners, the boisterous passions, the daring ambition, and the gross indulgences which formerly characterized the priest, the nobleman, and the sovereign, had now begun to yield to learning—the charms of refined conversation—political intrigue and private artifices.15

In this passage, a sixteenth-century observer looks at a twelfth-century building. But eighteenth-century readers are clearly invited to share the observer’s uneasiness about the uncouth roots of the civilizing process. The “boisterous passions” of the twelfth century disturb this observer rather as the “political intrigue and private artifices” of his own sixteenth-century Italy might disturb a Georgian reader. Radcliffe’s next book, The Romance of the Forest, handles this sort of contrast a little more subtly. Instead of explicitly describing a tension between the manners of different ages, it weaves the theme of historical change into the terrors of a twilit abbey, so that the fact of historical difference begins to feel like one of the secrets concealed there. Searching for a hiding place, Pierre de la Motte comes upon “the Gothic remains of an abbey” at dusk, and imagines “the hymn of devotion” and “tears of penitence” that once filled the space. He surveyed the vastness of the place, and as he contemplated its ruins, fancy bore him back to past ages. ‘And these walls,’ said he, ‘where once superstition lurked, and austerity anticipated an early purgatory, now tremble over the mortal remains of the beings who reared them!’16

There is something a bit opaque about the relationship between the first and second half of that last sentence. The specific social change that dispelled “superstition” and “austerity” seems to be conflated with the universal fact of

26 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819

mortality. But the nature of this connection, and the resulting thrill of terror, are elucidated a few paragraphs further on, when La Motte explores the irony more explicitly. La Motte sighed. The comparison between himself and the gradation of decay, which these columns exhibited, was but too obvious and affecting. “A few years,” said he, “and I shall become like the mortals on whose reliques I now gaze, and, like them too, I may be the subject of meditation to a succeeding generation, which shall totter but a little while over the object they contemplate, ere they also sink in the dust.”17

These passages are not reflecting simply on death. They more specifically explore the irony of perspective that that allows each generation to recognize the datedness of its predecessors, without being able to see the face they will themselves present to a “succeeding generation.” The secret buried in the Abbey of St. Clair, in other words, is the realization that the collective dimension of time amounts to a terrifying blind spot. Radcliffe’s treatment of this insight is rather explicitly modeled on James Macpherson’s handling of the same theme. To underline the parallel, Radcliffe introduces her description of the abbey with a quotation from Macpherson’s “Carthon”: “The thistle shook its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind.” The line is taken from a speech where Fingal reads a ruined hall (with ironic prescience) as a sign of his own civilization’s limits. “They have but fallen before us,” he reflects; “for, one day, we must fall.”18 “Carthon” finds a strange sort of comfort in human beings’ inability to understand history by identifying that temporal blind spot with Ossian’s visionary blindness. Radcliffe also transforms the darkness of history into a sublime consolation, but she does so in a more concretely acquisitive way. After the protagonist, Adeline, refuses the advances of a voluptuary Marquis, he has her imprisoned in a relatively modern part of the ruined abbey. She discovers a secret door in her chamber, however, which allows her to descend to an older part of the structure. There she discovers a rusty dagger and a manuscript written by a previous inmate. The inmate turns out to have been a father Adeline never knew, murdered by the Marquis, his half-brother. When the murder is revealed, Adeline retrieves her father’s bones from the abbey, and preserves the manuscript that first gave evidence of the crime “with the pious enthusiasm so sacred a relique deserved.” Because Adeline never knew her real father, the discovery of this murder is in effect Adeline’s discovery of her own biography. But the recovery of that

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personal story is staged in a way that implicitly compares it to the recovery of the social time contained in the abbey itself. To discover her father, Adeline has to descend to the abbey’s “ancient foundation.”19 Her father turns out to be one of the dead whose “reliques” La Motte could only imagine when he first saw the abbey. Though this all seems ghoulish enough, the effect of the parallel between personal and collective time—as far as plot goes—is to make Adeline a Marchioness, whereupon the abbey that sustained the analogy apparently becomes part of her estate. The terrifying historical blind spot that the abbey initially dramatized thus becomes the foundation of present-day social consequence. There are other sites of landed property in the novel, but the Abbey of St. Clair becomes the central image of property precisely because its layered obscurity allows it to conceal an alien and violent past. Wolfram Schmidgen, who has done more than anyone to show that Radcliffe’s abbeys and castles matter not just as props but as property, nevertheless reads Radcliffe in a way that poses a significant obstacle for the interpretation I have been advancing. I want to pause to consider his reading, for though in the end I disagree with it, I think the questions he asks are revealing ones. Schmidgen agrees that Radcliffe’s Gothic spaces of confinement are designed to represent collective time as a palimpsest composed of heterogenous layers. Indeed, he shows that the chronological disunity of Radcliffe’s buildings strongly echoes an architectural metaphor prevalent in late-eighteenth-century legal discourse, which compared English law to an “old Gothic castle” with apartments constructed in different centuries. The effect of this metaphor, in William Blackstone and Edmund Burke, is to dramatize “the continuous influence of past over present,” and to remind readers that landed property is the palpable embodiment of that social continuity.20 But, Schmidgen argues, this metaphor serves a very different purpose in Ann Radcliffe’s novels. Here, the Gothic castle is a figure of terror, and the heroine must escape to a more transparent space. Schmidgen concedes that this transparent space is not evident in Radcliffe’s first two works, and adduces the chateau at Leloncourt, where Adeline flees for protection in The Romance of the Forest, as the first good example of it. Situated in Savoy, and presided over by a benevolent Rousseauvian clergyman, this chateau is certainly an enlightened house, “characterised by an air of elegant simplicity and good order.” But as often happens with Radcliffe, obscurity and temporal depth are purged from this building only to reappear in the surrounding landscape. Leloncourt is surrounded by “dark

28 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel, 1790 –1819

woods” and “mountains of stupendous height . . . shooting into a variety of grotesque forms”; moreover, the darkness of this landscape is explicitly associated with the past. The benevolent clergyman, La Luc, often retires “to the deep solitude of the mountains, and amid their solemn and tremendous scenery . . . brood[s] over the remembrance of times past.” According to Schmidgen, this landscape is relatively disenchanted. Radcliffe undoes “the embedding figuration of time, space, and practice in the Gothic castle . . . by creating distance between observer and scene and by mediating appearance through spatial and temporal frames.”21 The effect is to separate La Luc from the landscape and to thematize his investment in the land as a mode of sentimental projection. There is some truth here: certainly the meaning of La Luc’s chateau is mediated more explicitly through its owner’s sensibility than is the case with Radcliffe’s more menacing buildings. But I don’t believe that this sentimental frame changes the meaning of the estate itself: landed property is still being used to evoke the sublime obscurity of collective time. Landscape can represent this obscurity as effectively as architecture. For instance, when Adeline accompanies La Luc on a tour of the mountains around Leloncourt, she gazes out over a prospect that places distant alps behind “the ruins of a fabric which once had been a castle.” “[T]hose stupendous mountains,” she remarks, “the gloomy grandeur of these woods, together with that monument of faded glory on which the hand of time is so emphatically impressed, diffuse a sacred enthusiasm over the mind, and awaken sensations truly sublime.” “It seems,” she continues a moment later, “as if we were walking over the ruins of the world [. . .] .”22 Although Radcliffe’s enlightened chateaus and her Gothic castles don’t represent fundamentally different kinds of property, Radcliffe’s different characters do possess property in fundamentally different ways. Where Radcliffe’s villains invoke property as an external source of power, her virtuous characters internalize its authority, and transform it into a melancholy kind of cultivation. For instance, Kate Ellis has remarked that Radcliffe’s heroines exhibit an “exaggerated sensitivity to nature” when they need to demonstrate their “independence from the market.”23 Though this is true, the “nature” the heroine responds to is usually framed as a view from an estate, and the heroine’s psychological independence remains explicitly modeled on the older, more tangible independence of the landed proprietor. The connection is perhaps clearest in Udolpho, where La Vallée is at once Monsieur St. Aubert’s retreat from “the busy scenes of the world,” and a kind

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of academy for sentimental heroines—complete with a library, a greenhouse for the study of botany, and a secluded fishing-cottage in the woods where music and poetry can be practiced. In this academy, his daughter learns that mental cultivation guarantees independence. But Emily learns this lesson, paradoxically, by borrowing an impulse from the property that surrounds her. “[T]he gloom of the woods . . . the cottage-lights, now seen, and now lost—were circumstances that awakened her mind into effort, and led to enthusiasm and poetry.”24 In short, brigands and tyrants possess the past as ponderous stone; Radcliffe’s heroines possess it by tenderly appreciating a gloomy landscape— although, to be sure, they also end up owning the landscape. The point of displacing magnificence from masonry to landscape is not to devalue landed property, or to distinguish “nature” from “culture.” As I have noted, Radcliffe sees very similar gulfs of time embodied in decaying battlements and in the grotesque mountains that surround them. The point of foregrounding landscape is rather to emphasize that, for Radcliffe’s heroines, property holds an essentially inward value, mediated by taste and memory. They prefer simple houses surrounded by magnificent landscapes because they are less concerned to display magnificence than to take it in. The distinction between mere possession and cultivated appreciation runs deeper, however, than the boundary between the house and its grounds. The same distinction can be dramatized by exploring different characters’ responses to the edifice itself. Chateau-le-Blanc, where the last third of Udolpho is set, is a ruinous pile, but for Count De Villefort it is associated with “the recollection of early pleasures” that have solaced him during “a long intervening period amid the vexations and tumults of public affairs” (). The Countess, however, is reluctant “to resign the gay assemblies of Paris—where her beauty was generally unrivalled, and won the applause, to which her wit had but feeble claim— for the twilight canopy of woods, the lonely grandeur of mountains, and the solemnity of gothic halls.” Preferring “gay assemblies” to ruined buildings is a sign of superficiality because it reveals that the Countess’s conception of society is focused shallowly on the present moment. Her voluble disdain for “this barbarous spot” forces the Count to remind her that all presentday distinction is founded on forgotten barbarity: “madam . . . this barbarous spot was inhabited by my ancestors.” His daughter Blanche requires no such reminder, because she has read more widely than her stepmother. For her, Chateau-le-Blanc recalls “a castle, such as is often celebrated in early story,

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where the knights look out from battlements on some champion below, who, clothed in black armor, comes with his companions, to rescue the fair lady of his love from the oppression of his rival.”25 In short, Radcliffe insists that the prestige of landed property is authentic only when property functions as the outward symbol of a hidden, inward time-consciousness. Property has to remind its owner of childhood memories, or of “early story,” or of “customs and manners” that form a “striking . . . contrast with the modes of his own times.” The precise content of these personal and historical recollections can be left rather vague. History as such matters less, in Radcliffe’s novels, than the formal parallel between time’s materialized authority and its subjective mystery. Neither half of the equation can be entirely dispensed with. Until it is appreciated by cultivated recollection, property is just vulgar display. But it is equally true that speculation about the past, unsupported by property, produces only fear and isolation. The protagonist’s sympathy with the past has to be worked through in damp corridors, and transformed into ownership, before it conveys any security or social consequence. In the last analysis, the effect of Radcliffe’s novels is neither to celebrate the official authority of property, nor to demystify property in favor of mental cultivation, but to compare her cultivated characters’ depths to the traces of former ages that lurk beneath the surface of a grand estate. In this way, she transforms the mystique of landed property into something that can be acquired through education.

Property and National Culture in The Wild Irish Girl The Gothic past typically emerges after a heroine has been rusticated in Italy, Scotland, Germany, or provincial France. But Radcliffe’s exotic locations are never simply savage: her brooding castles and mountains dramatize at once the obscurity of the past and its power to generate cultural prestige. This is the source of Radcliffe’s frequently-remarked similarity to travel literature. If Radcliffe had actually been (say) Italian, one can imagine that she might have added footnotes to tie the romance of setting even more closely to the antiquity of specific places and customs. This is, in any case, very much what happens in early-nineteenth-century Irish novels. The early national tales of Lady Morgan and C. R. Maturin could almost be defined as Gothic novels whose narrators identify ethnically with the Gothic setting they have chosen, and therefore depict it in a richer and more particularized way.

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The altered perspective changes the political argument of these novels completely: Radcliffe has nothing like the national allegory that organizes (for instance) Morgan’s Wild Irish Girl. If, on the other hand, one subordinates national politics to social wish-fulfillment, national tales and Gothic novels can appear very similar. The connection between Radcliffe and the early novels of Lady Morgan (then Sydney Owenson) is particularly close. Both authors stage a protagonist’s encounter with a frightening backwater (a castle in the Appenines, or on the west coast of Connaught), only to transform the external threat into a scene of self-discovery, so that the protagonist can appropriate the barbaric other as a forgotten or suppressed dimension of his or her own character. Both authors, in other words, make the obscurity of the social past serve as an engine of personal cultivation. In Radcliffe this engine is implicit in description, without becoming central to the plot: the historical mystery contained in architecture dramatizes characters’ subjective depth, but does little more than parallel the more immediately familial mystery that drives the action. In Morgan’s national tales, the story of historical cultivation moves to center stage. Characters’ relations with each other become inextricably bound up with their relationship to an unfolding mystery about the national past. Morgan’s early novels are thus in a sense perfected Gothics: Gothic novels whose setting has acquired a more intelligible relation to plot. This composite portrait is admittedly sketched with a broad brush, and needs to be qualified in several ways. It matters that the past is repressed by colonial power in Morgan’s novels, not hidden in a dungeon. And it matters that the culture acquired by Morgan’s protagonists is explicitly national in character. But Morgan’s nationalism doesn’t change the social wish-fulfillment in her novels as radically as one might suppose. Since twentieth-century anthropologists made a point of distinguishing the descriptive and normative senses of the word “culture,” it is easy to assume that “national culture” names an automatic possession, quite distinct from the sort of “culture” one might strive to acquire.26 If one started from that assumption, comparing Morgan’s “culture” to Radcliffe’s would be a semantic fallacy. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the aspirational and ethnographic senses of “culture” were not yet crisply distinguished; in fact, if Ernest Gellner is correct about the history of nationalism, the impulse to ethnographically define “national culture” was largely generated by a need to defend local cultural credentials against metropolitan competition.27 For this reason it is not surprising that early national tales articulate the value of national culture by drawing on

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older, pre-nationalist models of community. The protagonists of Morgan’s early novels still acquire culture much as Gothic heroines had acquired it, by plumbing the temporal depths of landed property. Though they are ostensibly repossessing a national legacy, their connection to the past still depends, in practice, on the collective time embodied in individual estates. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent () is usually described as the first “national tale,” but Morgan’s  novel, The Wild Irish Girl, established the outlines of a plot that became more typical of the genre: an Anglo-Irish absentee or cosmopolitan exile returns to Ireland to discover its national culture and confront its economic degradation. Mortimer, the protagonist of Wild Irish Girl, is the English-educated scion of an Anglo-Irish family with possessions in Connaught. His father exiles him to those possessions after a career of dissipation in London, and he travels, with rueful winces, into what he considers a savage land. Once in Connaught, he is gradually won over by the magnificence of landscape and architecture, by the antique dignity of Irish manners, and by the charms of Glorvina, the harp-playing daughter of an Irish prince who belongs, in fact, to the very family his seventeenth-century ancestors violently dispossessed. The marriage between Mortimer and Glorvina that ends the novel is explicitly compared to the  Act of Union, establishing a political allegory that figures benevolent English colonialism as a restoration of ancient Irish right.28 The novel is organized around a gradual unveiling of culture—so gradual, in fact, that it is never quite completed. Dismayed by his first encounters with Ireland, Mortimer discovers that the far west of Connaught shelters a more ancient and authentic national character. Without using the word “culture,” Morgan defines this character in a way that foreshadows the ambiguous breadth of significance “culture” would soon acquire. Footnotes about the customs and dress of the peasantry describe Irish ways of life ethnographically. But national identity is also represented as a principle of personal development, dramatized especially by Glorvina’s “versatile genius,” “whose nutritive warmth cherishes into existence that richness and variety of talent which wants only a little care to rear it to perfection.”29 This uneasy compound of ethnographic description and educational prescription advances an argument central to cultural nationalism: that the folkways of Connaught, and the talents of educated Irish professionals, are somehow mysteriously the same. But the novel’s techniques for turning culture into narrative aren’t as specifically national (or professional) as this argument might lead one to

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expect. Mortimer progresses toward a truer understanding of Ireland largely by traveling through a series of emblematic estates, which at once reveal and conceal the Irish past. He first arrives at M——house, the family seat, a “bleak and solitary” place that “has neither the architectural character of an antique structure, nor the accommodation of a modern one.” Here he is introduced to his father’s tyrannous agent, Mr Clendinning, and to the social problems associated with absentee ownership. M——house figures the Ireland that English colonialism has created: deprived of ancient grandeur without the compensations of modern prosperity. From this residence Mortimer flees to the Lodge, a smaller property situated in a wilder and more beautiful landscape. Here several descriptive features suggest a colonial appropriation of Irish culture: the building is surrounded by “groves druidically venerable,” and the bedroom usually occupied by Mortimer’s father is stocked with books about “the language, history, and antiquities of Ireland.”30 An atmosphere of mystery surrounds this property, hinting that a deeper past lies somewhere just beyond it. When Mortimer finally travels through the Lodge to reach the Castle of Inismore, he discovers an estate whose magnificence depends on its occlusion by historical change. Bathed in the light of a declining sun and of declining power, the Castle of Inismore evokes a culture that is at once eminent, ancient, and marginal. Landed property is not the only symbol of national culture in The Wild Irish Girl. Morgan’s characters, and her ethnographic footnotes, also carry much of the burden. But descriptions of character and manners are insistently paired with descriptions of property. M——house is surrounded by sullen, grasping peasants, while the peasants around the Castle of Inismore are “original and primitive.”31 The Prince of Inismore becomes a human embodiment of the spirit of property, characterized primarily by the mournful pride he takes in his own family seat and, more generally, in all the ruined properties of Ireland. He rhapsodizes on the topic in quasi-Ossianic language: But the splendid dwelling of princely grandeur, the awful asylum of monastic piety, are just mouldering into oblivion with the memory of those they once sheltered. The sons of little men triumph over those whose arm was strong in war, and whose voice breathed no impotent command; and the descendant of the mighty chieftain has nothing left to distinguish him from the son of the peasant, but the decaying ruins of his ancestors’ castle . . . 32

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Of course, the Ossianic coloring of this speech marks a degree of self-conscious archaism. The “Herculean” but stooped figure of the Prince defines him as a living ruin, and his less than perceptive interactions with other characters suggest that the authority of property is no longer a strong foundation for personal or national greatness. The friendship between the Prince and Mortimer is sealed, for instance, by the fact that Mortimer presents himself as a landscape artist interested in sketching the castle. Although Mortimer was indeed impressed by the castle, he is seeking more specifically to get a view of Glorvina, having been attracted by her “low wild tremulous voice” singing to a harp. This incident tells us most of what we need to know about father and daughter. If the Prince is characterized mainly through his ruined castle, Glorvina is characterized through her “versatile genius,” which encompasses Irish song, botany, and French and Italian literature. (Although Morgan represents Glorvina’s genius as “national” and “natural,” the content of her education remains in fact quite cosmopolitan—another sign that the book’s concept of national culture is not very remote from older models of cultivation.) Together, father and daughter dramatize the interdependence of property and culture. Radcliffe had represented that connection psychologically, by measuring different characters’ responses to the “hand of time” impressed on architecture and landscape. In The Wild Irish Girl, Morgan represents the same connection more allegorically, by condensing Ireland into a family of two: a father obsessed with ruined property, and a daughter obsessed with the arts. Father and daughter belong together, as Morgan makes clear, because inherited property and rank permit national culture to reach its highest expression. For all her mysterious self-sufficiency, Glorvina seems tethered to her father’s castle: a genius loci who never strays far from the landscape of her inheritance. Glorvina uses the concept of “true Milesian” descent, moreover, in a way that fuses the purity of national culture with the purity of noble lineage; though the novel pokes some fun at “Milesian” titles, it celebrates this aspect of Glorvina’s pride in a way that finally endorses her identification of national culture with a national aristocracy.33 Like Edgeworth, Morgan tends to assume that the political problems of Ireland can only be resolved by educating a more enlightened, patriotic, and cohesive landowning class.34 In this sense, The Wild Irish Girl represents culture as an aristocratic possession more explicitly than Radcliffe had. But precisely by giving the connection between culture and property a

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new allegorical clarity, Morgan fractures it. In Radcliffe, these dimensions of the collective past had been inseparable: Radcliffe’s protagonists can develop historical sensibility only by exploring “the solemnity of gothic halls” (and the equally solemn landscapes that surround them). In The Wild Irish Girl, literary cultivation constitutes a separate erotic subplot: Glorvina instructs Mortimer about Ossian, and Mortimer returns the favor by giving her copies of Werther and La Nouvelle Heloise. Once mind has been separated from matter in this way, the symbolic power of property begins to look like an anachronism. The Prince’s equation of gentility with land actually diminishes his stature; his fortunes are failing, as the local priest observes, because he “likes to hold more land in his hands than he is able to manage.” The future of Ireland belongs not to the Prince but to his cultivated daughter. Similarly, personal memory begins to displace aristocratic tradition: recalling ancestral heroism “was once the business of our Bards, Fileas, and Seanachies,” Glorvina remarks, “but we are now obliged to have recourse to our own memories, in order to support our own dignity.”35 Passages like these hint at the possibility of a direct connection between national history and personal memory, unmediated by property or lineage—a possibility that Morgan developed more richly in her later novels.

The Internalization of National History: O’Donnel and Florence Macarthy As Ina Ferris has observed, Lady Morgan’s heroines change fundamentally in her later novels. The heroines of O’Donnel (), Florence Macarthy (), and The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties () are never rooted, like Glorvina, to a spot. They are characterized, on the contrary, by an intensely theatrical mobility—popping up in unexpected places, often in disguise, and sustaining multiple identities on widely separated levels of the social hierarchy. Ferris persuasively argues that this transformation of female character is connected to a reconsideration of national culture, replacing the “drive to a Gaelic origin” with a new consciousness both of internal division and of the power that might be latent in hybridity.36 But the transformation of the Morgan heroine also expresses the author’s shifting assumptions about the personal sources of cultural authority. The heroines of Morgan’s later novels are not rooted to a spot because their power never depends, as Glorvina’s did, on the antiquity of an estate. They are instead writers of national tales (like Lady

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Clancare), founders of semi-religious educational institutions (like Beavoin O’Flaherty), and masterfully theatrical governesses (like Miss O’Halloran). They may acquire property and a title by the end of the novel: Miss O’Halloran for instance eventually becomes the Duchess of Belmont. But the acquired property is rarely described at length; it confirms the heroine’s ascent, but it never becomes integral to her character, as the Castle of Inismore defined Glorvina. In short, Lady Morgan’s later novels strive to distinguish personal cultivation from social status. Cultural authority is not made to depend on rank or property; on the contrary, it dramatizes independence from those criteria of gentility. Male and female characters claim this sort of independence in slightly different ways. Introducing General Fitzwalter in Florence Macarthy, the author makes the logic of cultural autonomy as overt as Pierre Bourdieu himself could desire: “Neither could the term gentility be appropriately applied to an appearance which had a character beyond it. He might have been above or below heraldic notices and genealogical distinctions, but he was evidently independent of them.” Fitzwalter is not “assignable to a class, a cast, a country” because his travels and philosophic reflections allow him to claim a cultural distinction that ostensibly transcends the ordinary field of social competition.37 Many of Morgan’s heroines are as well-traveled as Fitzwalter; those who are not, use their consummate powers of masquerade to become equally unplaceable. Because Lady Clancare can impersonate every walk of Irish life (from Catholic peasants and nuns to true-blue Protestant matrons), she acquires the privilege of laughing at the social hierarchy as a whole from a position ostensibly located outside it. Morgan’s new emphasis on the mobile autonomy of culture might seem to create problems for an author of “national tales.” If cultural authority is not rooted in ancient property—if it depends, in fact, on social and physical mobility—how can it remain connected to nationality and to a collective past? Morgan’s solution is to set her characters’ actions against the backdrop of analogous actions, carried out by analogous characters, in a much earlier era. Through patterns of uncanny re-enactment, as well as significant contrast, the present-day plotline thus gradually acquires a weight of national and collective significance. Morgan’s backstories often take the form of a chronicle or legend about the protagonist’s ancestors; the implicitly hereditary logic of this connection between past and present reveals that Morgan’s version of culture may not be quite as independent of “genealogical

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distinctions” as her narrator claims. But the vector of change is nevertheless significant. The patterns of re-enactment and contrast in O’Donnel were partly determined by the history of its composition. In , Morgan was working on a novel about Red Hugh O’Donnel, who fought the Nine Years’ War against the English during the reign of Elizabeth. Morgan had completed one volume of this work when she realized that the subject could still rouse extremely bitter memories. As she explains in the introduction, “I abandoned, therefore, my original plan, took up a happier view of things, advanced my story to more modern and more liberal times, and exchanged the rude chief of the days of old, for his polished descendant in a more refined age.”38 Morgan’s relatively cautious approach to reform is certainly perceptible here; as Barry Sloane has suggested, she avoids straining “the sympathies of her English publisher and readers” by refusing to trace injustice to its origins.39 But Morgan’s way of putting this is also significant: she goes looking not just for a more peaceful age but for a “more liberal,” “polished,” and “refined” one. The refinement of the modern Colonel O’Donnel is in fact Morgan’s solution to Irish political troubles. Excluded by penal laws from his ancestral property, condescended to by English tourists, O’Donnel remains at all times a pattern of cultivation and restraint. Through most of the novel’s first volume we see O’Donnel through the eyes of English gentry who meet him on a tour of Ireland’s northwest coast, and know him only as a reserved stranger who reads Newton and Adam Smith. His history and the revelation of his inner life are saved for the beginning of the second volume, when a carriage accident forces the English travelers to take shelter in O’Donnel’s house. Here they discover a painful contrast between his intellectual cultivation (revealed in books and scientific equipment) and his material circumstances (revealed in poorly-swept dirt floors). The mystery of that contrast begins to be explained when a servant shows them a fragmentary manuscript which is in effect a condensed version of the historical novel Morgan originally set out to write. The mansucript explains how the Red O’Donnel, heir to all of modern Donegal, was tricked and imprisoned by the English in the sixteenth century, how he escaped, and how he died, after years of war, fruitlessly seeking Spanish assistance. The discovery of this manuscript is rapidly followed by others: the house also contains a portrait of a more recent ancestor, the Abbé O’Donnel, who repeated certain aspects of the Red O’Donnel’s story—becoming a talented

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but “unrecompensed” agent of Spain, and losing the remnants of his family property to English penal laws. Finally we learn about Colonel O’Donnel’s own career, which has followed much the same pattern: he has already seen service abroad (where, like the Abbé, he found that the talents of a foreigner are often resented), and within a few chapters he will lose his last leased plot of land. O’Donnel’s mysterious combination of distinction and poverty is explained, in short, by establishing a series of parallels that link him to other moments in Irish history when deserving leaders were driven abroad by English hostility, and became the tools of foreign powers. Gothic novels had used ancestral echoes for different purposes. In Udolpho, for instance, Emily St. Aubert explores the bedroom where the Marchioness de Villeroi was murdered, and discovers a portrait of the Marchioness that uncannily resembles herself.40 As often in Radcliffe, the protagonist seems to be re-enacting her mother’s (or father’s) fate. But the distance of a single generation is too small to evoke the collective past—to do that, Radcliffe relies instead on descriptions of architecture and landscape. O’Donnel adopts a different strategy, which permits it to locate the authority of the past in character rather than setting. The motif of uncanny repetition is stretched out over centuries, in order to identify national history with the parallels and contrasts that connect the protagonist to his (or her) equivalents in other epochs. The significance of this strategy would be easy to misunderstand, because O’Donnel’s consciousness of repetition sometimes appears in the guise of aristocratic family honor—for instance, when he has qualms about selling his ancestor’s sword to raise badly-needed money. But though O’Donnel represents Irish history as the history of a family, the novel explicitly undermines O’Donnel’s faith in the continuity of family honor. In order to heal the errors of the past, he has to let go of those aristocratic pieties. In the end, O’Donnel does sell his ancestor’s sword (or at least its hilt). After slightly more hesitation, he pawns a ring given to him by Marie Antoinette. Though he enlists in foreign armies, he specifically refuses to fight for Spain, the nation his ancestors had served. Spain is England’s enemy in the Peninsular War— as it had been in the time of the Red O’Donnel—and Colonel O’Donnel is unwilling to follow his ancestors by taking up arms against England. Perhaps most importantly, he angrily corrects his servant’s claim that the O’Donnels are still the rightful owners of all the estates their ancestors lost to antiCatholic penal laws. The penal laws may have been unjust, but O’Donnel

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believes that “possessions long maintained, however gotten, are consecrated by the lapse of ages, and held by the best of all tenures, prescriptive right.”41 In all of these instances, O’Donnel breaks with his ancestors in order to dramatize the author’s view that the prosperity of Ireland depends on “a spirit of accomodation and conciliation in all parties.”42 Catholics should receive full political rights, in exchange for fully accepting the present distribution of property. As Mary Jean Corbett has shown, Morgan had already expressed similar opinions in The Wild Irish Girl.43 But The Wild Irish Girl made a rather awkward vehicle for this opinion. Although the novel insists that property is a settled question, for most of its length it hovers nostalgically over the lost or ruined properties of the Catholic aristocracy. O’Donnel, by contrast, can resign lost property without dissonance, because property is no longer the novel’s central symbol of Irish history. The family estate that O’Donnel finally recovers is hardly described at all—only mentioned in an anticlimactic coda to the book. The cottage built by O’Donnel’s uncle, the Abbé, receives slightly more attention: in a twist on Gothic tradition, it is said to have been built with materials borrowed from a larger ruin connected to the family’s past. But this humble house is very unlike Radcliffe’s sprawling structures. It becomes important not as a symbol of the past in its own right, but as an occasion for subjective meditations that correlate historical and personal time. Toward the end of the book, O’Donnel is returning on foot to the cottage, where he will be surprised to find the Duchess of Belmont, and a marriage that resolves the problems of money and status that have dogged him throughout the novel. But before reaching this happy ending, the novel pauses to remind the reader once again that O’Donnel’s sufferings have a national and representative character. It achieves this, oddly, by allowing the protagonist to review different epochs of his own life. As he passed through the rocky defile which led immediately to the humble residence of his youth, the memory of former times rose vividly on his mind. He recalled in a rapid review the several periods at which he had formerly passed this little ravine, when each time, as he thought, he was never to behold it more. In boyhood, when warm and aspiring, unworn in spirit, and fresh in feeling, he forgot the dark destiny which urged on his wandering steps, and saw only the beacon light of hope which guided him to glory and renown. Again, when his fortunes had fallen with those of an empire [in the French Revolution], after a short interval of repose, he had left the temporary asylum of its solitudes, to draw, for the first time, his sword under the consecrated

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shadow of his country’s banner. In a still more mature period of life, he sought, for a third time, among these rocks, a shelter from poverty and despair; but rising again superior to the wreck of all his hopes, he had again gone forth to earn subsistence by his sword.44

The life that flashes before O’Donnel’s eyes in this passage is, in effect, the life of a whole class of Irish gentry. O’Donnel’s memories are organized around three moments of self-chosen exile—a pattern that is heavily overdetermined in a novel whose fundamental critique of colonial rule is that it fails to provide opportunities for native talent, forcing Ireland’s natural leaders to seek their fortunes abroad. Indeed, O’Donnel’s three moments of leave-taking roughly recapitulate the novel’s abbreviated history of his family (and Ireland itself)—from the Red O’Donnel’s naïve confidence, through the Abbé’s excessive reliance on a foreign “empire” (inflected, perhaps, by memories of ), to Colonel O’Donnel’s own “poverty and despair” in a world stripped of chivalric illusion. This passage is as close as O’Donnel comes to a moment of anagnorisis: the location of the passage, and the expectant intensity of its rhetoric, strongly suggest that O’Donnel is recognizing, for the first time, the underlying pattern of his life. But for a moment of self-recognition, it is oddly void of personal implications. Reviewing these three moments of departure does not lead O’Donnel to any decision, or give him a tragic insight into his destiny. The significance of the pattern he glimpses seems to lie instead in the loose parallel it establishes between his life and the life of the nation. Even this is left unstated. Instead of recognizing anything specifiable about his identity as an Irishman, O’Donnel receives a vague intimation of collective promise and disappointment.45 Because Colonel O’Donnel’s own memories and family history recapitulate the history of the nation, O’Donnel can dispense with the symbolic geography of property Morgan used to represent history in The Wild Irish Girl. Although the subtitle of the novel announces it as a “national tale,” O’Donnel in fact troubles Katie Trumpener’s assertion that the national tale before Waverley maps culture across space rather than time. 46 O’Donnel’s relationship to his own (personal and familial) past dramatizes cultural change in somewhat the same way that Edward Waverley’s will do, and it is not surprising to find that Scott enjoyed the novel.47 The next section of this chapter will give fuller attention to the connections between Scott and Morgan.

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Tales of Historical Amnesia: Guy Mannering and The Antiquary When Walter Scott is juxtaposed with Lady Morgan, there is a tendency to treat the contrast between the two authors as a synecdoche for a generic boundary. Scott comes to represent “the historical novel,” while Morgan stands for “the national tale.”48 In fact, the generic boundary runs through the œuvres of these two authors rather than between them. Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties is a historical novel by almost any definition of the genre: it dramatizes the transformation of national culture (as Katie Trumpener would demand), and the lives of its characters are intertwined with great public events (as Avrom Fleishman would demand).49 It has always been unclear, on the other hand, why Guy Mannering or The Antiquary should be called historical novels. Scott’s second and third works of fiction lack the epic scope of Waverley; except for an invasion that fails to happen at the end of The Antiquary, they focus on private life. Works of this sort can fit within a flexible definition of “the historical novel”; they are set a few decades in the past, and are certainly “works in which historical probability reaches a certain level of structural prominence,” to borrow Harry Shaw’s capacious description of the genre.50 But several works by Lady Morgan would fit that definition at least as well as these puzzling works by Scott. I would suggest that the distinction between “national tales” and “historical novels” is best understood as a gradual transformation perceptible within the œuvres of several different novelists, rather than as a contrast between authors. In the middle of the Regency period (between  and ), Scott and Morgan each wrote several novels that are difficult to assign to either genre. In fact, four of the novels they wrote in these years are so similar that they might be seen as comprising a coherent sub-genre, located transitionally between the “national tale” and the “historical novel.” O’Donnel and Florence Macarthy by Morgan, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary by Scott, can all be described as stories about an exile who returns to repossess alienated property on Britain’s colonial margins. In all four novels, the exiled protagonist is a military man who travels incognito; in all four novels, the discovery of the exile’s true identity is a crucial turning-point in the plot. Moreover, all four novels contain a back-story about the protagonist’s ancestors, and the gradual revelation of that back-story generates much of the suspense in the latter half of the narrative. All four novels also contain a substantial admixture of romance elements, woven into the ancestral back-story: there is a prophecy

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connected to the alienated estate, and the protagonist can only repossess the estate by repeating or reversing the historical traumas his ancestors suffered.51 One might call these novels, for lack of a better term, “tales of historical amnesia.” They are not as obsessed with national character as The Wild Irish Girl or Castle Rackrent; nor are they as concerned to dramatize social change as Waverley and Old Mortality. Instead they dramatize history as an occluded memory that needs to be revived before the protagonist can claim the authority of the past. The coherence of this transitional sub-genre has been obscured, in large part, by the accident that Scott’s famous first novel owed less to the national tale than his second and third did. Guy Mannering and The Antiquary may be located, formally, between the national tale and the historical novel, but they are not “transitional” works in a causal, biographical sense. Scott did not have to write them before he could write Waverley. For that reason, the significance of the intermediate position they occupy has not often been remarked. Even a novel like Waverley, of course, has a great deal in common with the national tale—from the logic of uneven development that guides Waverley’s travels to the national marriage that ends his story. But since Waverley is also strongly indebted to the tradition of “anti-romance” that stretches back through Fielding and Defoe to the seventeenth century, its points of connection to the national tale appear, on the whole, more parodic than genuine.52 Waverley has remained a critical touchstone, not just because it was Scott’s first novel, but because this anti-romantic tone enables a crisp demarcation between genres— a convenient demarcation for critics who want to represent Scott’s historicism as another disenchanting insight in the long march of realism. As a corrective to that emphasis, I’d like to stress the romance elements that link Scott’s second and third novels to the contemporaneous works of Lady Morgan. If we attend to those connections, they may reveal how the disenchanting insights of historicism were themselves fueled by social fantasy. The four novels I have christened “tales of historical amnesia” resemble each other in a number of significant ways: the sub-genre deserves to be connected, for instance, to the Napoleonic wars and to colonialism.53 In what follows, however, I will focus on the way these novels collectively refigure the prestige of the past. In examining Morgan’s two contributions to this group of novels, I have already suggested that the motif of historical amnesia tends to displace the authority of collective time from landed property to the historical consciousness of individual characters. Historical consciousness

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drives the plot, of course, in the negative form of historical unconsciousness: suspense hinges, not on what characters know, but on parts of the back-story that are forgotten or unexplained. But the continuity of collective life depends on overcoming that amnesia. Plots are managed so that the protagonist’s exploration of his relationship to the past restores order to a local community, and status to the protagonist himself. This may mean that the protagonist recovers a lost estate or title. But because he has served as a military officer in the interim, the trappings of aristocracy now appear to be earned rather than inherited: the landed gentry loses authority in order to recover a transformed kind of status through the genteel professions. This recovery of status also depends, in all four novels, on an archival subplot. The protagonist’s efforts to reveal the true relationship of past and present are seconded by the labors of an antiquary, like Jonathan Oldbuck, or an oral historian, like Terence Oge O’Brien or Meg Merrilies—or they are supplemented, as in O’Donnel, by fragmentary chronicles incorporated in the text. The military man’s strenuous commitment to profession can be consecrated as the equivalent of aristocratic birth only after it has been enriched in this way by historical perspective. Not too long ago, the authority of landed property seemed profoundly central to Scott’s fiction. According to Alexander Welsh, the Waverley novels collectively composed a “romance of property,” organized around a “hero of prescription”—an insight that has shaped much of the best subsequent work on Scott. For Welsh the inheritance of land lies at the center of Scott’s plots, and the passivity of the hero corresponds to the almost metaphysical passivity that Burke and Blackstone attribute to real estate.54 This characterization of Scott is accurate and useful for critics who are mainly interested in contrasting him to other nineteenth-century fiction: Scott’s estates do carry more social weight than, say, estates in Dickens. But an early-nineteenth-century reader, familiar only with the fiction of the previous century, might have been surprised less by the prominence of Scott’s estates than by their volatile and comic fortunes. Much recent scholarship on Scott has been devoted to illuminating this point. Wolfram Schmidgen has persuasively read Waverley as a story about the hollowing-out of the traditional authority embodied in Baron Bradwardine’s estate of Tully-Veolan. The weather-beaten bears and other emblems of “ancestral right” are destroyed by English soldiers, and although the estate is restored at the end of the novel, Schmidgen argues that its passage through English ownership has left it “disembedded from its social, political, and national contexts, . . . a museum of Scottish history” rather than a living

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tradition.55 Much the same thing could be said about The Antiquary, where estates similarly have to be rescued by bourgeois or apparently “illegitimate” owners in order to be preserved at all. In the process, the authority of landed property is tacitly compared to the dubious authenticity of the antiquarian relics that various characters bury, pretend to discover, or use to pay their debts. The effect (as Yoon Sun Lee has observed) is to erode the distinction between the historical authority of a possession and its commercial value.56 Moreover, as Shawn Malley notices, Scott described the construction of his “new old” estate at Abbotsford with a similarly ironic self-consciousness.57 The debts that eventually beset Abbotsford certainly only heightened Scott’s skepticism about architectural illusions of permanence; the frame story to Chronicles of the Canongate () implies quite pointedly, with bitter selfconsciousness, that the continuity of written memory is more reliable than the sort of continuity embodied in property.58 In short, the historical authority of the landed estate is certainly a central motif in Scott—but it is usually a darkly comic motif. Guy Mannering illustrates this backhanded respect for property in a way that is particularly relevant to the thesis of this chapter, because it shows how Scott’s extended descriptions of ruins and castles can actually emphasize their ineffectiveness as symbols of historical continuity. The story behind Mannering pivots on a case of amnesia. Harry Bertram, heir to the Ellangowan estate, is kidnapped at the age of five, fulfilling predictions made at his birth both by the gypsy Meg Merrilies and (more playfully) by Guy Mannering, an English gentleman who dabbles in astrology. Almost seventeen years later, after an army career in India, Bertram returns to Scotland as Vanbeest Brown, unaware of his true name, class, and nationality. The central action of the novel is the revelation of Bertram’s identity and the recovery of his estate. As Ian Duncan has observed, this story of an heir lost and found in fulfillment of prophecy “is a remarkable imitation . . . of a Shakespearian romance plot.”59 The specifically historical constraints on the novel are, by contrast, relatively slight. Though the plot is enriched in many ways by Scott’s familiarity with the characters and manners of eighteenth-century Scotland, it need not have taken place specifically in the s and s. Guy Mannering does use property as a concrete symbol of national history. Divided into a ruined Auld Place and a New Place built shortly after the Acts of Union, Ellangowan is also surrounded by a landscape that shades from a pastoral foreground into “remoter hills . . . of a sterner character” that evoke

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a warlike past. But the symbolism of this setting is laid on so thickly that it provides an occasion for a deflating self-consciousness very characteristic of Scott. We see Ellangowan first through the eyes of Guy Mannering, an Oxford-educated Englishman who has been touring the Scottish frontier, making drawings of “monastic ruins.”60 His appreciation of Ellangowan’s division into Auld and New drifts into free indirect discourse, and into an embarassingly explicit projection of desire. How happily, thought our hero, would life glide on in such a retirement! On the one hand, the striking remnants of ancient grandeur, with the secret consciousness of family pride which they inspire; on the other, enough of modern elegance and comfort to satisfy every moderate wish. Here then, and with thee, Sophia!— We shall not pursue a lover’s day-dream any farther.61

As he wrote Guy Mannering, Scott was planning Abbotsford, and he was already quite aware that architectural historicism could invent a “secret consciousness of family pride” and fuse it with “moderate” and “modern” comfort. His self-consciousness about that aspiration is expressed here through ostentatiously fictive gestures (e.g., “thought our hero”) that surround the fantasy and identify it as a “lover’s day-dream.” The same wryness persists throughout the book whenever history materializes as architecture. Like Mannering, Harry Bertram enters Scotland as a tourist making sketches; one of the first things he does there is to climb Hadrian’s wall to “moralise” in explicitly predictable ways about the contrast between modernity and antiquity.62 Bertram and Mannering are both sympathetic characters, and it would be a mistake to read the narrator’s wryness at these moments as outright satire. The narrator calls attention to the projective dimension of ruin sentiment, not to mock his characters’ reflections on history, but in order to connect those reflections to the personal time of memory and expectation. This connection becomes most explicit when Guy Mannering returns to Ellangowan after an absence of sixteen years. In the interim a great deal has changed both in his life and at Ellangowan: his marriage to “Sophia” has involved him in a maze of jealousy and guilt, and Ellangowan is up for sale to cover its owner’s debts. After a pleasant ride of about an hour, the old towers of the ruin presented themselves in the landscape. The thoughts, with what different feelings he had lost sight of them so many years before, thronged upon the mind of the

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traveller. The landscape was the same, but how changed, the feelings, hopes, and views, of the spectator! Then, life and love were new, and all the prospect was gilded by their rays. And now, disappointed in affection, sated with fame, and what the world calls success, his mind goaded by bitter and repentant recollection, his best hope was to find a retirement in which he might nurse the melancholy that was to accompany him to his grave. “Yet why should an individual mourn over the instability of his hopes, and the vanity of his prospects? The ancient chiefs, who erected these enormous and massive towers to be the fortress of their race and the seat of their power, could they have dreamed the day was to come, when the last of their descendants should be expelled, a ruined wanderer, from his possessions!”63

The overt Johnsonian moral of this meditation is not of great significance to the novel. The young Mannering saw “ancient grandeur” in Ellangowan Auld Place because of his own ambitions; the middle-aged Mannering now sees the vanity of human wishes because of his own regrets. But the novel doesn’t dwell at length on either theme. What the novel does dwell on, with sustained fascination, is a subtler analogy between Mannering’s subjective sense of time and the historical time manifested in Ellangowan. Both experiences of time entail a certain blindness, related to a pun used twice in the passage above. As Mannering passes through different stages of life, his changing “prospects” are reflected in the “prospect” (i.e., landscape) he sees, so that he cannot now perceive the same Ellangowan he saw sixteen years earlier. In a similar way, the “ancient chiefs” who built the Auld Place could not “have dreamed” of their descendant’s fate, because their experience gave them no way to imagine the modern legal and financial chicaneries that have reduced Godfrey Bertram to poverty. Mannering reflects on their blindness as if it offered a sort of Stoic consolation for his own, but the narrative pleasure of the analogy between his experience and theirs has little to do with stoicism. Instead the reader is being set up for a moment when both forms of blindness (personal and historical) will be overcome at once. Although the perspective that overcomes these limitations belongs ultimately to the reader, characters do intermittently share it. Guy Mannering, like most of Scott’s novels, exploits a historical form of dramatic irony by using social context to reveal a significance in actions that is hidden from the actors themselves. Scott’s capsule history of the Bertram family allows his readers to see, for instance, how the material pressures on a particular class of Scottish gentry tempt Godfrey Bertram to complete his family’s destruction in the very

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act of trying to reassert their gentility. Bertram knows the same facts, but he is too deeply embedded in them to grasp their significance. In episodes such as this, the pleasures of historical perspective depend on the reader’s superiority to a character’s limited point of view. But at other moments, Scott’s characters briefly become the vehicles of historical perspective rather than its victims. While traveling to meet Julia Mannering, Harry Bertram happens to step ashore at Ellangowan Auld Place, and “unconscious as the most absolute stranger,” wanders through the estate that belonged to his ancestors and would belong to him now, if he knew his own identity. His response to the ruins develops into a moment of self-estrangement that is also self-recognition. “And the powerful barons who owned this blazonry,” thought Bertram, pursuing the usual train of ideas which flows upon the mind at such scenes,— “do their posterity continue to possess the lands which they had laboured to fortify so strongly? or are they wanderers, ignorant perhaps even of the fame or power of their forefathers, while their hereditary possessions are owned by a race of strangers? Why is it,” he thought, continuing to follow out the succession of ideas which the scene prompted, “why is it that some scenes awaken thoughts, which belong as it were to dreams of early and shadowy recollection, such as my old Brahmin Moonshie would have ascribed to a state of previous existence? Is it the visions of our sleep that float confusedly in our memory, and are recalled by the appearance of such real objects as in any respect correspond to the phantoms they presented to our imagination? How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither the scene, nor the speakers, nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place. It is even so with me while I gaze upon that ruin. . . .64

This gleam of recollection amid the ruins leads Bertram to suspect that the scene may “have been familiar to me in infancy,” a revelation that is immediately followed by a confrontation with the usurper Glossin that sets the novel’s denouement in motion. The revelation of Bertram’s past and the recovery of his rights may thus appear to be catalyzed by the antiquity of property—rather as Adeline, in The Romance of the Forest, discovers her own familial past in the bowels of a ruined abbey. But though Guy Mannering does loosely echo that Radcliffean plot, the novel seems at the same time to deflate its implications. Bertram’s initial responses to Ellangowan are framed by the same sort of wry observation that undermines ruin sentiment elsewhere in the

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novel: they are “the usual train of ideas which flows upon the mind at such scenes.” Bertram’s train of ideas becomes interesting only when it takes an oddly subjective detour into speculations about reincarnation, anamnesis, and (what would later be called) déjà vu.65 The dramatic emphasis falls not, as in Radcliffe, on the ruin and the ancient artifacts it contains, but on a mysterious connection between the ruin and Bertram’s subjective experience of time. This connection repeats, but reverses, the connection between personal and historical time established earlier by the middle-aged Mannering. In both scenes, a character gazing on the Auld Place meditates on the “ancient chiefs” who built it. But where Mannering had compared the blindness of youth to the blindness we all share as creatures with a historically limited imagination, Bertram transforms personal amnesia into historical vision—using a dizzying moment of personal déjà vu to overcome his own (dramatically ironized) ignorance “of the fame and power of [his] forefathers.” There is a strong analogy between this turning point in Guy Mannering and the climactic homecoming scene in O’Donnel. Both scenes focus on a character’s dawning recognition of his own ignorance; Colonel O’Donnel reviews his life, after all, by focusing on the different kinds of blindness that have colored his three departures from home—“when each time, as he thought, he was never to behold it more.” In both novels, the return to an ancestral home is important, not because the home itself bears legible historical traces, but because it awakens a temporal vertigo that allows the protagonist to glimpse the shadowy historical backdrop of his life. The setting is not irrelevant: these scenes are staged as moments of homecoming because landed property still has the power to evoke collective time. But Regency novels are not willing to take the time contained in property quite as seriously as Radcliffe had done; they treat it merely as a convenient occasion to dramatize another sort of time located in the protagonist’s mind. This inward sense of time remains as dim and obscure, however, as any of Radcliffe’s Gothic interiors. Although Colonel O’Donnel’s life tacitly recapitulates O’Donnel’s history of Ireland, he never directly articulates the parallel, and the point of the parallel is in any case to emphasize the Irish gentry’s tragic inability to grasp the historical circumstances that have shaped their fate. Harry Bertram rhapsodizes in general terms about human blindness to history (“are they wanderers, ignorant perhaps even of the fame or power of their forefathers . . . ?”)—reflections that acquire an added ironic edge since the blindness he is meditating on turns out to be his own.

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Scott and Morgan admittedly dramatize the theme of amnesia in different ways. In Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, Scott’s protagonists are foundlings who have literally forgotten their own past and parentage. Morgan produces an analogous effect by allowing her protagonists to travel incognito; although the protagonist’s true identity, and connection to national history, are concealed from other characters (and from the reader), the protagonist will eventually turn out to have known or suspected the truth all along. The absence of literal “amnesia” in Morgan’s novels does not make their representation of history less subjective: the protagonists of O’Donnel and Florence Macarthy may remember their own names, but their struggle to document and comprehend the past still has the effect of dramatizing social continuity as a subjective mystery, especially since their knowledge is largely concealed from the reader. But the protagonist’s concealed knowledge does signal a difference of tone. Morgan’s characters remember their own names, and Scott’s don’t, because Scott is interested in mining the dramatic irony of their ignorance. The theme of historical amnesia evokes a mixture of sublimity and satire in both authors, but Morgan tends to emphasize the sublimity, where Scott pushes the theme in a satirical direction. This divergence of tone may be related to the political differences that separated the two authors. Although both are fascinated by human beings’ limited ability to understand the systems in which they are placed, this fascination has a more immediately polemical point for Scott because of his conservatism. Many of Scott’s dramatic ironies can be understood as glosses on Edmund Burke’s warning against political innovation: The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science; because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens [. . .]. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend.66

Just to stay with Guy Mannering, for instance, when Godfrey Bertram’s zeal to expel gypsies and smugglers impoverishes the life of the local cottagers, and leads indirectly to the abduction of his child, Scott’s narrator underlines an explicitly Burkean moral: “Even an admitted nuisance, of ancient standing,

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should not be abated without some caution.”67 Morgan is equally fascinated by the limits of human knowledge, but because she is less interested in drawing a Burkean moral of humility, her characters don’t have to be victims of dramatic irony: they are often allowed to understand and embrace the mystery of their own limited perspective. In Florence Macarthy, for instance, one of General Fitzwalter’s companions sneers at nationalism by pointing out that the idea of nationality gets its power from the pitifully restricted sphere of human experience. “[A]ll countries are alike: little masses of earth and water; where some swarms of human ants are destined to creep through their span of ephemeral existence; coming, they know not whence;—going, they know not where.” Fitzwalter responds by embracing the sublimity of conscious limitation: “These little masses of earth and water . . . are therefore precious and important to the ants that creep on them; and each little hill is dear to the swarm that inhabits it, as much from that very ignorance as from interest.”68 For some purposes, the contrast between Morgan’s “romantic” attempt to make limitation self-conscious and Scott’s “realist” decision to enact it through irony will matter more than the assumptions the two authors share. This chapter began by describing the battle-scenes that Stendhal and Tolstoy famously use to dramatize history’s invisibility. Those scenes resemble Scott more closely than they resemble anything in Morgan precisely because they share Scott’s reliance on dramatic irony. This is not necessarily a sign that, say, Stendhal shared Scott’s conservatism; by the middle of the nineteenth century, this sort of irony pointed less to the hubris of the French Revolution in particular than to a broader epistemological agenda. Novelists like Stendhal and George Eliot use the ironic distances that separate their characters’ perspective from the narrator to dramatize the way human consciousness is always colored by a local historical situation, while nevertheless holding out the possibility that we can free ourselves from that situation sufficiently to comprehend other circumstances and cultures. As Harry Shaw has argued, the paradox implicit in making both claims at once would become troubling only if the characters’ limitation and the narrator’s omniscience were both imagined as absolute; whereas in practice, novelists like Scott and Eliot imagine the narrator’s broadened sympathies as a “regulative ideal.”69 Indeed, one could argue that this is why realists often chose to enact a broadened perspective in narrative rather than embodying it as an attribute of character: it allowed them to avoid representing historical understanding as a state that could be fully and finally achieved.

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Where narrative technique is concerned, in short, Scott’s connection to nineteenth-century realism may matter more than the parallels that link him to Lady Morgan. This would be true especially if we were concerned to evaluate technique; for although Scott and Morgan share some of the same historicist insights, Scott’s ironic narration probably enacts the situated character of human knowledge more effectively, and less paradoxically, than Morgan’s attempt to represent that limitation as self-conscious ignorance. Here, however, I’m less interested in evaluating technique than in understanding the social tensions that gave these insights a pointed significance in the early nineteenth century. How could such abstract themes (the historically-situated character of knowledge, and the blindness it entails) become compelling enough to organize a whole genre of popular narrative? Here, I think, is where the parallels between Scott and Morgan become illuminating. For although their novels reflect different conscious politics, and different approaches to narrative craft, they are driven by very similar kinds of social wish-fulfillment, especially in the period between  and . I have already suggested that one of the functions of historical amnesia is to allow the status once possessed by the landed gentry to be (re)discovered in and through the genteel professions, with a bit of help from historical cultivation. But the premise of amnesia also produces a strange sort of status that elevates characters without defining their social station. The anonymity of the protagonists in these novels is not just a suspenseful veil that heightens the pleasure of the final revelation, but an integral part of the peculiar distinction these novels are concerned to celebrate. I have already mentioned that Lady Morgan’s later heroines are elevated above other characters by their superior powers of mobility and masquerade: because they can impersonate any rank and religion, it seems impossible to pin them down to a specific place in Ireland’s social hierarchy. In reality, of course, this flexibility depends on a determinate possession, which we might call cultural capital. When Morgan’s heroines finally cast off their masks, they turn out to be people who make their living from culture—as reforming educators, or even writers of national tales. The social ambiguity of Scott’s characters is similarly linked to cultivation. When we first meet Harry Bertram, the narrator notes that “His dress is so plain and simple that it indicates nothing as to rank—it may be that of a gentleman who travels in this manner for his pleasure, or of an inferior person of whom it is the proper and usual garb.” Though the narrator goes on to note that he carries “a volume of Shakespeare in each pocket,” the

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point of this detail is not to resolve the mystery of Harry’s rank but to hint that literary culture underwrites his transcendence of the rank system.70 I would suggest, in short, that the appeal of “historical amnesia” comes from its power to dramatize cultural distinction as a free-floating mode of distinction, perpendicular to ordinary classifications of rank. The protagonist’s origins are concealed in order to take title and property (temporarily) out of the equation, focusing attention instead on signs of personal cultivation. Culture confers prestige in part by connecting its possessor to the collective past, so these characters are shown to be readers of old chronicles and letters, or Shakespeare and Spenser. But the characters also share much of the reader’s ignorance about their own connection to national history. Scott’s characters are victims of dramatic irony, and even Morgan’s remain mystified by the parallels that link their lives to ancestral precedent. These blind spots prevent historical cultivation from becoming a a fixed and limited possession; it connects the protagonist to the past, without permitting her to grasp or appropriate the connection. This flaw, which makes historical cultivation a perpetually unfinished project, also prevents it from dwindling, like fashion, to become one mark of status among many others. Historical cultivation can appear to transcend the rank system because it depends on a vertiginous glimpse of the past—what Keats will call a “wild surmise”—rather than a list of specifiable knowledge. Although the conceit of historical amnesia represents culture as a classless principle, the idea that a classless mode of distinction could transcend existing barriers of rank was a fantasy likely to appeal, in practice, to the middle classes. The special relevance of historical cultivation to the middle ranks of life is dramatized with particular clarity by a dream in Scott’s Antiquary. Because none of the characters involved know all of the relevant facts, the dream’s full significance remains accessible only to the reader. This is possible in part because the role of protagonist is shared, in The Antiquary, by two people. The young military officer who is traveling under the assumed name of Lovel ought to be the protagonist, if youth, unrequited passion for a young woman above his station, and a name that evokes “love” and “novel” at once count as any qualification for that role. But Jonathan Oldbuck, the titular antiquary, spends more time on stage. Biographical evidence has led many critics to conclude that Oldbuck is partly a caricature of Scott’s own passions—from his enthusiasm for the obscurer details of local history to the tragically disappointed love that hovers in his past (which may echo Scott’s own rejection

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by Williamina Forbes).71 Since the story of love opposed by barriers of rank is repeated in the lives of both Lovel and Oldbuck, it seems likely that the divided protagonist of The Antiquary is Scott’s way of composing a portrait of the artist as a young man and a sagely disappointed old one at once. In any case, sentiment and symbolism are certainly heightened whenever the novel explores a parallel between Lovel’s life and Oldbuck’s. These parallels are displayed particularly in the Green Room, a rarelyused chamber of Oldbuck’s house which is hung with tapestries, and supposed to be haunted by the ghost of his sixteenth-century Flemish ancestor, the printer Aldobrand Oldbuck. For Jonathan Oldbuck, the room is haunted more compellingly by memories of his lost love, Eveline Neville, who chose passages from Chaucer that the young Oldbuck caused to be embroidered on the borders of the room’s ancient tapestries. Eveline, unfortunately, chose to marry an earl, and Oldbuck became an unmarried misogynist. Toward the end of the novel’s first volume, Lovel visits Oldbuck and spends a night in the Green Room. The tapestries come alive as he sleeps, and he sees (presumably in a dream, though the visionary quality of the dream makes this ambiguous) a fur-capped Flemish bourgeois who points to an unknown foreign phrase in a book. The next morning he seems to recognize the same phrase when Jonathan Oldbuck points to Aldobrand’s motto on the title page of an Augsburg Confession. The motto, “Kunst macht Gunst,” or “skill wins favour,” is explained as an emblem of Aldobrand’s “independence and selfreliance, which scorned to owe anything to patronage, that was not earned by desert.” The printer’s self-reliance won him both economic success and the hand of the fair Bertha, even though that hand was also sought by several “half-starved sprigs of nobility.”72 It thus turns out that the ancient Flemish printer and the young British officer are linked as middle-class professional men confident that they have entered an era when skill (rather than noble descent) will win favor—though the intervening disappointment of Jonathan Oldbuck does shadow that faith with a certain cynicism. In the closing pages of the novel Lovel will turn out to be the Honorable William Geraldin, the long-lost son of an earl. But since his character in no way resembles his (proud, gloomy, Catholic) father, this discovery has the effect of a promotion rather than a revelation of class identity. When Lovel finally marries Isabella Wardour, the wedding ring is given not by any of his biological relatives, but by Jonathan Oldbuck, and it bears the legend “Kunst macht Gunst.”73 The theme of middle-class meritocratic aspiration was by no means a new

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one. But there is something novel about Scott’s decision to represent middleclass self-reliance as an ancestral legacy transmitted by dreams in an old haunted chamber. The point of self-reliance, for William Godwin and other bourgeois radicals of the s, had been to liberate the individual from the dead hand of hereditary rank. The Antiquary takes up the theme in order to transform the idea of meritocracy itself into a new kind of inheritance. Aldobrand’s self-reliance matters precisely because Lovel can inherit it from the distant past—although the heritage is mediated by cultural symbols (Flemish tapestries, passages from Chaucer, the history of printing) and not by real property or biological descent. The permanence of the estate has been displaced by a cultural model of collective time, dependent on the old books that give Aldobrand Oldbuck his last name. But the mediation of those books through an ambiguously visionary (or haunted) dream of sixteenth-century Flanders should remind us that this cultural model of time borrows its grandeur from the same sort of discontinuity that darkened Radcliffe’s halfruined and stylistically-incoherent edifices. Regency-era novelists imagine historical cultivation, not as a character’s induction into unbroken tradition, but as a discovery of the contrasts, gaps, and perspectival dilemmas that make it difficult to grasp one’s connection to the past.

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that the national tales and historical novels of the Regency era celebrate historical cultivation in an interestingly indirect way. Although the protagonists of these novels are often addicted to reading about the past, their consciousness of history is dramatized most forcefully as blindness—when they forget, overlook, or only belatedly recognize the historical parallels and contrasts that define their own lives. The point of this blindness to history is not simply to generate irony. In these novels, an unconscious connection to history renders characters more impressive, implying that they possess the authority of the past in a free-floating form that doesn’t depend on ownership of property or determinate signs of social rank. In this way, the prestige of historical cultivation comes to depend on the very problems of perspective and scale that make it difficult for subjects to perceive historical change. Before broadening this argument into a general claim about romantic historicism, I need to confront an obvious question: How far does it really apply beyond the novel? In fiction, the formal centrality of suspense requires protagonists to misunderstand a great deal at the beginning of a story. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that blindness to history should be a central theme of historical fiction. Before concluding that the necessary imperfection of historical knowledge had actually become integral to its social authority, we might want to ask whether the sublime paradoxes that darkened Regencyera fiction also held the same sort of value outside the covers of a novel. When h av e a r g u ed

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early-nineteenth-century readers opened a volume of history—or simply read old books—how did they understand the cultivation they were acquiring? In particular, how did they balance the prestige of skeptical self-consciousness against the value of positive knowledge? One of the chief ways we reconcile these aspects of cultivation today is by leaning on the metaphor of “historical perspective.” The metaphor of perspective improves on older metaphors like “breadth” by evoking the limitations of visual experience. Knowledge is unavoidably limited, just as an observer’s position necessarily distorts scale with foreshortening and hides some parts of the scene behind others. But as the phrase is familiarly used, to see things “in perspective” is also to set them in their correct proportions and relations—by analogy to the kind of correctness that pertains in visual art, where artists strive deliberately to reproduce the distorting effect of a single vantage-point. Talking about historical perspective is thus a convenient way of acknowledging that historical knowledge is situated and limited while simultaneously insisting that a limited form of knowledge can reveal a deeper truth. It’s not always clear whether the historical observer’s imagined vantage point(s) are located in the past or in the present. A recent manual designed to shape historical education in elementary and middle schools, for instance, advises teachers that “comparative world history helps develop historical perspective.” Here students seem to be contrasting different parts of the past from a single vantage point in the present. But the same manual stresses that “historical perspective helps students develop a broader view of current controversies”—which seems to imply that students imaginatively adopt various standpoints in the past in order to view the present from different angles.1 In short, the metaphor of “historical perspective” doesn’t prescribe a perspective with much specificity. It more vaguely implies that the value of historical education depends on the very thing that might appear to be its weakness—the fact that a given subject will look radically different depending on one’s vantage point. I’ll argue that this way of imagining the value of history can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century. I don’t mean simply that writers rely on perspectival metaphors to characterize historical reading. They do, but I’m less interested in the visual metaphor itself than in the implications that cluster around it—especially the implication that the benefits of historical study are somehow bound up with the inherent limitations of historical knowledge. I’ll examine late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century texts

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that combine a vivid consciousness of the reader’s cognitive confinement in the present with an ambitiously comparative project for history, so that historical consciousness is dramatized as a tension between the determinate present moment and the multiplicity of vanished possibilities that shadow it. My examples will be drawn from works of history, but also from essays about the study of history, and from poems that dramatize historical consciousness. I’m less concerned to describe genres of historical writing as such than to explain changes in the perceived social value of history. I’ll argue that romantic writers began to represent historical consciousness as a struggle between singleness and multiplicity in order to dramatize the boundary between historical cultivation and other forms of social distinction.

Teaching Readers to Take the Long View Living in an age when historical publications are divided between specialized academic research and broader works for a general audience, it may be difficult to imagine that readers of history ever had to be encouraged to adopt a generalizing, comparative approach. But in the late eighteenth century, the tensions between writers and readers of history were differently organized. A genre of writing that had often amounted to a narrative of military and political events was expanding to encompass a broader range of social material, including commerce, the arts, and manners.2 As Ann Rigney has shown, the introduction of this new material often strained the narrative framework readers expected.3 At the same time, the audience for history was expanding; the period sees a proliferation of abridgments, summaries, and “manuals of universal history” designed for middle-class readers who needed general orientation in the world more than they needed a refresher course on leadership from Plutarch. The traditional justification for historical study— which had represented history above all as a storehouse of examples of civic virtue—did a poor job of describing the reading practices that suited these new genres and audiences.4 In this context, historians seem to have found it necessary to lecture their readers about the importance of abstracting, generalizing, and comparing. The point of these lectures may not actually have been to create new reading practices, but to justify emerging practices not yet consecrated by tradition. In any event, the new emphasis on a comparative rationale for history flourishes toward the downmarket end of the historical genre: in one-volume works of

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universal history, handbooks of chronology, and lectures explicitly aimed at a middle-class audience. Beginning roughly in the s, these kinds of works advance a new justification of history, not as a collection of exemplary political models, but as a mode of imagination that readers have to use in order to envision society as a whole, or indeed to access any aspect of social life outside the scope of their own immediate experience. Although we now think of Joseph Priestley as a scientist more than a historian, he played a significant role in defining and popularizing this model of historical cultivation, both through his Lectures on History and through his celebrated and very widely imitated Charts of biography and history. Priestley’s definition of history does not focus on political wisdom. For Priestley, “every thing comes under the denomination of history, which informs us of any fact which is too remote in time, or place, to be the subject of our personal knowledge.”5 This strikingly broad definition includes much that we might call “current events,” as well as the cultural and economic life of the past. The point of studying history is not specifically to emulate leaders, but simply to get a “full length” view of the world that would otherwise necessarily elude us. Priestley’s account of the value of history thus turns out to hinge on skepticism: he has to explain why ordinary daily experience inevitably fails to provide a comprehensive view of the world. [T]he examples which history presents to us are generally complete. The whole is before us. We see things at full length, as we may say. . . . Whereas in real life every scene opens very slowly; we see therefore but a very small part of a thing at one time, and are consequently liable to be deceived into a very fallacious judgment of it; particularly considering how distorted even those imperfect views of things are by the relation of every thing to self, which it is impossible to keep out of sight in things in which we ourselves are concerned.6

History, in short, has the task of counteracting the distorting effects of temporal proximity and self-interest. For that reason, Priestley concludes, it “is calculated for the use of persons of both sexes, and of men of all ranks, and all professions in life.”7 In fact, this rationale for historical study might seem especially calculated for the middle ranks of life, inasmuch as it counters the narrowing effect of self-interest that was sometimes felt to make commercial professions incompatible with public virtue. Since history has the task of integrating experience that would otherwise be atomized, it is for Priestley essentially a comparative project. It requires

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“that the experience of some ages should be collected and compared, that distant events should be brought together; and so the first rise, entire progress, and final conclusion of schemes, transactions, and characters, should be seen, as it were, in one unbroken view, with all their connexions and relations.”8 Priestley’s tendency to imagine historical understanding as a process of visual unification—which brings “distant events” together “in one unbroken view”—is dramatized in a particularly concrete way by his affection for historical timelines. Although Priestley wasn’t the first person to make use of them, timelines were a relatively recent invention, which Daniel Rosenberg has dated to the s. As Rosenberg also stresses, Priestley’s Chart of Biography () and New Chart of History (; see Fig. 1 overleaf) were “the most influential timelines of the eighteenth century,” going through twenty editions and spawning imitations in England, Germany, and France. Indeed, “in the  statement of the Royal Society of London marking Priestley’s induction, it is his Chart of Biography rather than his scientific work that is mentioned.”9 Both charts compress world chronology into poster-sized visual aids. The horizontal axis represents time while the vertical axis is divided by area of expertise (in the Chart of Biography) or region of the globe (in the Chart of History). The space thereby defined is filled with line segments representing individual lives (in the Chart of Biography) or colored areas representing the sway of empires (in the Chart of History). Comparative conclusions that would be difficult for an individual reader to deduce become visible at a glance: it’s the work of a moment to grasp the relative duration of the Roman and Persian Empires. Priestley’s charts define a newly ambitious goal of synoptic and immediate historical comprehension. But it would be just as accurate to say that they reflect a new self-consciousness about the imaginative obstacles that prevent readers of history from grasping what they read. If, as Priestley suggests, “we have no distinct idea of length of time, until we have conceived it in the form of some sensible thing that has length, as of a line,” then historical time is difficult to imagine, and no reader can have grasped it very distinctly before the timeline was invented. Nor was Priestley entirely satisfied with his own solution. He spends several pages describing the reasons for the “necessary imperfection” of his chart, including the problem that “extensive empires cannot be represented by contiguous spaces,” and that it “can by no means give a just idea of the largeness of empires.”10 In short, Priestley popularized something more influential than a new visual aid for studying history: he popularized a new topic for readers of

Fig. 1. Joseph Priestley, A New Chart of History (London: J. Johnson, 1769). Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.

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history to worry about. It was no longer sufficient to learn important dates, or draw lessons from the lives of notable men; one also had to get an immediate impression of the shape of history as a whole. I describe this as something to “worry about,” because Priestley represents it as a challenge for the human imagination. But it was also clearly something to boast about, and especially something for writers of historical manuals and abridgments to boast about. The incompleteness of a brief summary was no longer necessarily a makeshift; it could be understood as a deliberate strategy for rendering significant patterns visible, and thereby producing the right sort of historical cultivation. In fact, the incompleteness of the historical record itself could be seen as a good thing, inasmuch as it reduced history to a manageable size. Several late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historical manuals begin with this reflection, including John Bigland’s Letters on the Study and Use of Ancient and Modern History (). Bigland explains that it’s possible to write universal history only because most of the events that have been preserved are not worth remembering, and most of the events that are worth remembering have not been preserved. To comprise a history of the world, in a work of so limited an extent, would appear a ridiculous attempt; and yet, perhaps, so much as is worth retaining in the memory might be brought within a narrow compass. The most uninteresting narratives of battles and sieges, of desolation and carnage, a thousand times repeated . . . may amuse vulgar minds, but can afford little entertainment to an intelligent reader, whose ideas are more enlarged, and who desires to form a comprehensive view of things. The inquisitive mind, desirous of drawing a true picture of human existence, contemplates the origin and progress of the arts and sciences, of systems and opinions, of civilization and commerce. . . . The details of those important affairs, are either totally wanting in the records of past ages, or obscure and uncertain. No more than general views can therefore be obtained.

Bigland is less concerned to advise historians than to explain how history should shape the reader’s mind. Readers who want to be “intelligent” rather than “vulgar” will seek “to form a comprehensive view of things.” In order to do so, he goes on to explain, they need to be selective and contrastive, focusing not on details but on “the causes which influence and direct the opinions and conduct of men, in different ages, in different countries, in different situations of life, and under different political and religious establishments.”11 This rhetoric is certainly, among other things, a way of reassuring readers

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that they don’t need to buy a longer book. But it also offers the process of summary and abridgment quite seriously as a model of the formation of historical consciousness. During the Napoleonic Wars, discourse about the necessity of abridging history often took the special form of bemused reflection on the excessive eventfulness of recent decades—for instance in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Dialogue in the Shades,” where Clio complains to Mercury that she has “had more business for these last twenty years than I have often had for two centuries,” and proposes to make room on her scroll by “striking off some hundreds of names,” mainly at the “mouldy” end of the roll. Barbauld’s dialogue produces obvious effects of amusement and horror—horror because Clio is clear that her “business” has consisted largely in counting, e.g., “two hundred and thirteen thousand human bodies and ninety-five thousand horses that lie stiff, frozen, and unburied on the banks of the Berecina.”12 But as various historical figures petition Clio to keep their places on the scroll, the dialogue also has the less obvious effect of dramatizing historical consciousness as a process of judicious selection and subtraction. This implication (latent in Barbauld’s dialogue) is more overt in Hester Lynch Piozzi’s two-volume abridgment of world history, Retrospection (). Piozzi defends abridgment as a necessity in “disturbed and busy days” when “young people are called out to act before they know.” But she distinguishes her mode of abridgment from “fashionable extracts . . . where no one thing having any reference to another thing, each loses much of its effect by standing completely insulated from all the rest.” By contrast Our Work, though but a frontispiece and ruin, contains between [each selection] some shaded drawings, such as we find in rudiments of painting, and will, like them, be good for young beginners. Perhaps, too, those who long ago have read, and long ago desisted from reading histories well-known, may like to please their fancies with the Retrospect of what they feel connected in their minds with youthful study [. . .].13

The metaphor of “retrospection,” which recurs throughout the book, does two things for Piozzi. First, by evoking personal memory it focuses attention on the reader, and makes clear that Retrospection will be less concerned to record details than to form historical consciousness. At the same time, Piozzi’s reference to “rudiments of painting” and “shaded drawings” suggests that she is conscious of the visual metaphor built into the etymology of “retrospect.” And her emphasis on the necessity of relating each part of

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history to the rest suggests that the point of the visual metaphor for her, as for Priestley, is to stress the essentially relational, comparative nature of historical consciousness.

The Historical Catalog Poem Some puzzling categories of romantic-era poetry begin to make more sense if they’re understood as ways of dramatizing historical cultivation of the kind Priestley had promoted, which relies on condensation and contrast in order to generate an immediate impression of the shape of history as a whole. This seems, in fact, to be the central purpose of a minor subgenre of romantic lyrics, which might be called “historical catalog poems.” As lyrics devoted to historical meditation, these poems are clearly related to an older sort of lyric that took ruins and monuments as prompts for reflection. But in the catalog poem, the ruin is missing. The speaker gazes not at Stonehenge but at a natural phenomenon (the moon, sun, or sea will do nicely). The poem is set in motion, not by the mute appeal of crumbling stone, but by an illusion of natural timelessness that collapses when the speaker finds herself thinking about the many different civilizations who also gazed or sailed across, say, the sea. If the ruin poem contained an implicit boast about travel, the catalog poem implicitly boasts a historicist consciousness that has learned to see the past as present in the most unlikely places. We can call this boast not just “historical” but “historicist,” because the form of the genre implies that each civilization in fact sees something slightly different: history alters and inflects even the eternal forms of nature. “A Hymn of the Night” (), by the collaborative authors William and Mary Howitt, is a late but perfect example of the genre. In form the poem is basically an ode, composed of five fourteen-line stanzas. It begins by apostrophizing the moon, asking her to reveal “All she has seen and all she now surveys / And how the young earth looked in her primeval days.” The next two stanzas speculate about long-vanished people who gazed at the moon in different ways. The moon was the first thing to meet Eve’s eyes in Eden; it was studied by Chaldean shepherds and worshipped by Egyptian priestesses. At the end of the third stanza the speaker shifts into imperative mood, still addressing the moon: Oh, call back from thy memory’s treasury all Thou hast beheld;—wake kingdoms past away;

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Image forth deeds of wonder, and recall The great ones of the earth from dark decay.

This is followed by a catalog of various historic or prehistoric figures who deserve to be reanimated: “prophets and kings,” the inventors of arts and agriculture, and “the blind father of the lyre.” Finally, the speaker asks the moon to reveal “the Elysian lands that lie / In their unknown-of quiet”— hidden spots of the present-day map unmarked by “passion’s tumult.” The poem ends with the realization that this is a vain request. “No spot / Of unknown lands thou seest where man has left no blot.”14 One of the striking ways this poem differs from the tradition of ruin poetry is by refusing to articulate a vanitas theme. Since the poem contains no crumbling monuments, there is no obvious prompt for reflection on the vanity of earthly immortality. But the poem’s response to that theme is not just to omit but to reverse it. The darkly knowing final lines seem to fill the emotional place that would once have been occupied by meditation on the frailty of earthly memory and the vanity of fame. But instead of concluding that earthly achievements fade, leaving no trace behind, the poem suggests that they leave only too many traces. There is “no spot” on the globe left unblotted by the history of human passion. While this observation is delivered as if it were somehow sobering, the rhetoric of reanimation elsewhere in the poem makes it look suspiciously like wish-fulfillment. “A Hymn of the Night” seems to promise that the past can never be wholly lost, since it remains latent even in something as generic as moonlight. It is thus really possible, at least imaginatively, to “recall / The great ones of the earth from dark decay.” This strangely earnest treatment of earthly immortality is central to many historical catalog poems. It is particularly insistent, for instance, in Felicia Hemans. The five lyrics she wrote that fit most clearly into the “historical catalog” genre—“The Treasures of the Deep,” “The Voice of the Wind,” “The Magic Glass,” “The Departed,” and “Communings with Thought”— all emphasize the speaker’s curatorial relationship to the memory of the dead. Several of the poems use that sentimental premise as a springboard for fantasies of physical resurrection. “The Treasures of the Deep” (), for instance, surveys various forms of human achievement swallowed up by the sea (treasure-bearing “Argosies,” “cities of a world gone by,” and modern warships) before concluding “Earth shall reclaim her precious things from thee! /—Restore the dead, thou sea!”15 In Victor Hugo’s “Slope of Reverie” (), cities of the past similarly emerge from the soil and give up their

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dead.16 In other authors, the invocation of immortality may be more oblique or complex. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” isn’t, on the whole, a historical catalog poem, but the seventh stanza does offer a sort of thumbnail sketch of the genre, rapidly tracing a particular homesick longing from classical (“emperor and clown”) to Biblical (“the sad heart of Ruth”) to romanticmedieval contexts (“faery lands forlorn”).17 Although a well-established critical tradition informs us that the nightingale should be understood as a figure for the immortality of art, it has never been entirely clear why Keats finds it so easy, here and elsewhere, to conflate the “immortality” of art with actual personal survival. It is even more difficult to understand where Hemans and the Howitts get the poetic belief that the moon and sea could “Restore the dead,” or the poetic confidence to so command them. One way to approach this question would be to consider how the historicalcatalog poem (and related poetic gestures) are related to eighteenth-century speculation about immortality. Consciousness of historical change posed a problem for every kind of afterlife. Even in heaven, Thomas Burnet pointed out, it was hard to imagine an afterlife that would preserve worldly community in any meaningful way. What language would departed souls speak after death? Would they be grouped together by nationality? And if so, “what is to be done by us the inhabitants of this Island, who have had so many Languages and so many Originals? Shall we speak Welsh in our aërial bodies, or Saxon, or Norman, or as we do at this Day, a Mixture and Compound of them all?”18 Earthly fame was even less secure. The metaphor that inflated fame into “immortality” was of course very old, but eighteenth-century philosophers found that it would no longer bear much weight. When Diderot announced that “posterity is, for the philosopher, what the other world is for the religious man,” his correspondent Falconet was quick to point out that posterity made a poor substitute for heaven. Posterity can only promise immortality to a select few; writers have more reason to believe in it than their readers do. Moreover, posthumous fame is vulnerable to accident and injustice.19 Edward Young’s Night Thoughts highlighted a more fundamental problem: historical change hollows out the significance of memory even when memory does survive. The point is not just that monuments crumble, but that “Empires die: Where, now, / The Roman? Greek? They stalk, an empty Name!” Shorn of its original social context, fame has no human meaning.20 The speakers of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems are preoccupied by this anxiety. They suspect that historical change will be so complete that it hollows

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out all the consolations of fame: stories will be forgotten and memorials will have no meaning for a future generation living a radically different kind of life. Unable to deny that fear, Macpherson inverts it to produce a strangely literal fantasy of historical immortality. Ossianic characters imagine themselves as voices carried on the wind, to be heard by men of “other years” who “admire the chiefs of old, and the race that are no more.”21 Nagging suspicions about the emptiness of outdated fame are transformed into an audible form of historical difference that constitutes immortality. romantic-era critics developed a similarly historicist model of immortality by distinguishing it from mere contemporary “fame.” On one level the point of the distinction is that fame has to be tested by time before we know its value. But the flip side of that claim is often an acknowledgment that history changes the nature of fame and makes its possessor unrecognizable to himself. “When we hear any one complaining that he has not the same fame as some poet or painter who lived two hundred years ago,” William Hazlitt observes, “he seems to us to complain that he has not been dead these two hundred years.”22 The “immortality” envisioned in historical-catalog poems involves a sea-change of this sort. It resembles the afterlife of Macpherson’s explicitly dated ghosts, with the difference that Regency-era speakers tend to identify with posterity rather than the ghosts themselves. This subjective dimension of immortality (what one might call “immortality reception”) was already prominent in Macpherson, since his heroes spent much of their time communing with the ghosts of yet-older-heroes. It also dominated eighteenthcentury responses to Ossian: in Goethe’s Werther, for instance, Ossian’s poems are represented as stories about visionary experience of the past. What a world the magnificent poet carries me into! To wander across the heath, with the storm-winds roaring about me, carrying the ghosts of ancestors in steaming mists through the dim moonlight. To hear from the mountains, amid the roar of the forest stream, the half-dispersed groaning of the spirits from their caves.23

It isn’t difficult to see the continuity between Werther’s fantasy and a catalog poem like Felicia Hemans’s “The Voice of the Wind” (), premised on the conceit that the wind carries the sounds of vanished civilizations as they echo down “the dark aisles of a thousand years.” The epigraph to “The Voice of the Wind” (“There is nothing in the wide world so like the voice of a spirit”) is in fact drawn from one of Thomas Gray’s letters on Ossian.24

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In short, writers of historical catalog poems could ask the moon or sea to reanimate the dead because they were drawing on a poetic tradition that had resolved anxieties about historical change by representing consciousness of historical difference, semi-playfully, as an ability to hear or see ghosts. The last stanza of “The Voice of the Wind” illustrates the limits of the playfulness involved fairly well. Are all these notes in thee, wild Wind? these many notes in thee? Far in our own unfathomed souls their fount must surely be; Yes, buried, but unsleeping, there Thought watches, Memory lies, From whose deep urn the tones are poured, through all Earth’s harmonies.25

The effect of this stanza is less to deflate the central conceit than to point out that, on a psychological level, it’s meant seriously. Somehow the sounds of the historic past (“the rollings of triumphant wheels, the harpings in the hall / The far-off shout of multitudes”) are genuinely preserved in human “Thought” and “Memory.” To put this another way, although “The Voice of the Wind” is not literally about ghosts, it is really about immortality. It illustrates Emile Durkheim’s observation that the idea of immortality is powered less by belief in personal survival than by identification with the permanence of the group. The poem is not particularly interested in the personal survival of the conquerors and harpers it describes, but it is concerned to show that they are somehow collectively contained “in our own unfathomed souls” in spite of time and change. Of course, as the word “unfathomed” may hint, this fantasy of collective permanence also has a personal dimension: a soul that can imaginatively contain the whole human past implicitly lays claim to its own sort of boundlessness. In historical catalog poems, this promise of immortality is explored figuratively, but it could also become quite literal— for instance in the nineteenth-century “religions of humanity” advanced by French thinkers like Auguste Comte, who gave identification with history a sacramental character. Even in England, as Adam Potkay has recently shown, writers like William Wordsworth and John Stuart Mill developed a theory of “impersonal immortality” that hinged on the individual’s identification with “the life of the community.”26 Identification of this kind required a consciousness of history very different from the emulation of exemplary civic heroes that had been recommended in the eighteenth century. In Felicia Hemans’s “Communings with Thought”

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(), for instance, the speaker urges her own thoughts to dwell on obscure and forgotten corners of the past: Go, visit cell and shrine! Where woman hath endured!—through wrong, through scorn Uncheer’d by fame, yet silently upborne By promptings more divine!

In the poem’s closing stanzas, after a long catalog of historical scenes that cannot be tied very precisely to names or dates, the freedom to range imaginatively across time is equated to immortality. Go, shoot the gulf of death! Track the pure spirit where no chain can bind, Where the heart’s boundless love its rest may find, Where the storm sends no breath!



Higher, and yet more high! Shake off the cumbering chain which earth would lay On your victorious wings—mount, mount—your way Is through eternity! 27

We already know that imagination can usurp the place of religious transcendence in romantic lyric. The odd and interesting aspect of Hemans’s poem has to do with the way it uses history to accomplish this. For while the poem makes very strong claims about history’s power to elevate the mind, it relies not at all on the traditional rationale for those claims, which was that the reader of history will learn to emulate heroic figures, and draw maxims of conduct from their example. In fact, since the figures in Hemans’s poem are “uncheer’d by fame,” it is not clear that their stories have ever been recorded. The speaker certainly doesn’t resemble the ideal reader of history from Bolingbroke’s frequently reprinted Letters on the Study and Use of History. On the contrary, she seems to be indulging the very “wantonness of curiosity” that Bolingbroke warns against: her mind is elevated less through the content of historical example than through the sheer diversity and range of historical incident. 28 This mode of cultivation resembles the synoptic perspective promoted by Priestley’s timelines and by romantic-era historical abridgment: it invites identification with the bewildering diversity of the past, even at the cost of some forgetfulness. A loosely analogous logic governs several of Keats’s sonnets about the

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difficulty of understanding Greek works of art. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (), for instance, spends most of its lines describing not the marbles but the “dizzy pain” of apprehending them across a gulf that is at once historical difference and the social marginality of a writer who cannot claim to have visited Greece or know Greek. The speaker experiences cultural bafflement as an acute consciousness of mortality: “each imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship tells me I must die.” There is of course a backhanded consolation in this line, since anyone struggling with “godlike hardship” has already set one foot outside the limits of mortality. And when the marbles themselves are finally described, at the end of the sonnet, they mingle “Grecian grandeur” with a montage that looks oddly like the speaker’s own dizzy consciousness of time, distance, and mortality: “the rude / Wasting of old time—a billowy main— / A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.”29 In short, it turns out that the only way to appreciate the grandeur of these ruined marbles is to fail to understand them, because their grandeur is located not in themselves but in the gulf of historical difference that separates them from the present. The “indescribable feud” that deranges the speaker’s senses presses his claim to possess a source of prestige now far more important than Greek or the Grand Tour—an immediate experience of the alienation produced by historical time.30 Although “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is not an historical catalog poem, it does help explain why middle-class writers—like William and Mary Howitt, or Felicia Hemans—might have been attracted to the catalog form. In Keats’s sonnet, the speaker’s inability to appropriate objects of cultural prestige turns out to be the true source of cultural prestige—a dizzy sense of temporal distance that transcends all merely determinate signs of grandeur. Historical catalog poems may not own up to the competitive dimension of culture quite as candidly as Keats does, but they do dramatize cultural distinction in a similar way: as a wide-ranging consciousness of difference that transcends the trappings of prestige in any particular time or place. The form turns a middle-class writer’s lack of worldly experience into a positive advantage, since the fact that the speaker’s historical knowledge consists only of dim intimations can be made to dramatize the very quality of indeterminacy that makes culture superior to titles, property, and worldly fame.

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Historical Perspective as an Educational Doctrine In late-eighteenth-century Britain, the idea that readers should construct a mental model of the entire human past carried more weight in ad hoc educational practice than it did in theory. While the authors of timelines and abridged world histories celebrated the importance of contrast and synthesis, writers in most other contexts continued to justify historical study by invoking the exemplary value of individual characters and events. “To read history properly” was still “to enquire into the characters of those we there meet with, and to judge of them wisely and cautiously.”31 By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the relative importance of different justifications had been largely inverted. When writers discuss the value of history in the s, they mention the instructive force of historical example only as an afterthought. The mere representation of vanished modes of life is increasingly taken to be an end in itself, with a value that hardly needs justification. Occasionally, writers do pause to justify it, as for instance in an essay “On the Study of History,” published anonymously in a Scottish literary annual in . (The author may have been John Wilson or J. G. Lockhart.) [T]he knowledge we can personally acquire, the intimacy into which we can thus enter with our species, is insufficient and unsatisfactory, because it is restrained within the narrow circle in which we ourselves move and observe. History alone subjects Man to our knowledge in all conditions and circumstances. States of existence, the most widely separated in nature, are here brought together under our inspection. Circumstances the most dissimilar to those comprehended by our own experience are delineated . . .32

History cultivates the mind, in other words, simply by giving readers a complete view of the human species, including especially the contrastive touchstones of “circumstances the most dissimilar to . . . our own experience.” The author’s confidence that direct personal experience can never provide such a view is based on a tacit assumption that “conditions and circumstances” transform human nature down to the core. Circumstances cannot be factored out to reveal an underlying human essence; instead, through the mediation of history, opposite and “widely separated” modes of life have to be compressed into a single picture. As this synoptic rationale for historical study became more dominant in the s, visual metaphors for historical understanding proliferated and

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grew more elaborate. In An Essay on the Study of Modern History (), James Shergold Boone writes that The philosophical observer . . . not only surveys all countries in detail, but endeavors to comprehend them at one view: he travels with the speed of imagination from the fields of the richest cultivation to the pathless steppe and the barren desert. . . . He contemplates not only enlightened times, but the ages of superstition, of ignorance, of rude and uncultivated bravery, wild and warlike jurisprudence. . . .33

In , an anonymous essayist wrote that “chronology is to history what perspective is to painting,” a metaphor that would be frequently repeated by nineteenth-century writers.34 In the United States, Emma Willard took up the analogy between chronology and perspective in a strikingly literal way. Willard is best known for founding the Middlebury Female Seminary and Troy Female Seminary—the first institutions of higher learning intended specifically for women. But in addition to her institutional duties as principal of these seminaries, Willard wrote several works on geography and history, including A System of Universal History, In Perspective (; see Fig. 2). Like Priestley’s historical writings, this summary of world history is accompanied by a timeline intended to dramatize its novel plan of organization. This is, as the title suggests, nothing less than an attempt to apply the laws of visual perspective to historical education. An attempt is here made to exhibit history in its proper relative proportions. The painter allows to objects in space less and less room upon his canvass as those objects recede into the distance. Such is equally the order of nature in regard to objects as they exist in time. Yet, the distant mountain must have more room in the picture than the dark valley than lies near. Thus tower Greece and Rome, amid the dimness of antiquity, and thus sink the dark ages, though nearer to the foreground.35

Willard’s accordingly transforms Priestley’s timeline in two ways. She makes the timelines of various nations converge as they recede into the past, to visually dramatize the effect of temporal distance. But she also uses “shade, as in a picture, to represent obscurity and moral darkness, and light to represent the reverse,” so that some temporally remote things (the Roman Empire, or the Incarnation of Christ) seem brighter and more prominent than the recent history of, say, China and India—which are sunk either in obscurity or in moral darkness (the alternatives are in this picture effectively equivalent).36

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Twenty-first century readers are likely to be disconcerted by Willard’s willingness to conflate the “obscurity” of a period with its “moral darkness.” Obscurity resides entirely in the observer’s degree of information or ignorance, whereas moral darkness is at least ostensibly an objective attribute belonging to the period itself. Strictly speaking, there was nothing new about this conflation. A similar conflation had always been implicit, for instance, in references to the “Dark Ages”: the epithet implying both that we know little about them, and that it probably wouldn’t be worth knowing more. The conflation of subjective and objective attributes becomes newly visible in Willard’s system, however, because she embraces it so openly. The whole idea of presenting history “in perspective” is a candid acknowledgment that representations of the past not only are distorted by the observer’s location, but should be. In the introduction to Willard’s History of the United States (), she enlarges on this principle. Each individual is to himself the centre of his own world; and the more intimately he connects his knowledge with himself, the better will it be remembered. . . . Hence, in geography, he should begin with his own town, and pass from thence to his country, and the world at large; in history, with the year in which he was born, and the record of the family Bible. With its dates the mother might easily connect and teach to her child some of the epochas of his country. Your grandfather or your father, she might say, was born so much before or after the declaration of independence—your own birth was during the administration of such a president.37

Since I have attended mainly to British writers up to this point, it may be worth pausing for a moment to note how the logic of historical contrast is both preserved and transformed as it crosses the Atlantic. Broadly, Willard echoes the tacitly middle-class priorities of British historiography in the early nineteenth century, presenting history not as as political education for a ruling class, but as a mode of cultivation for private persons who would not otherwise grasp their role in the larger system of human existence. The strong analogy she draws between historical knowledge and personal memory flows from this assumption, as does her willingness to embrace a degree of perspectival ignorance about the “obscurity and moral darkness” of the past. But Willard’s perspectival model of historical cultivation is also shaped more specifically by her desire to assert the importance of an overlooked national foreground. Historical education should begin with one’s own family and

Fig. 2. Emma Willard, Picture of Nations; or Perspective Sketch of the Course of Empire, frontispiece from A System of Universal History, in Perspective (Hartford: F. J. Huntington, 1835). Courtesy of the University Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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country, not with dubious “tales of hereditary power and splendor to inflame the imaginations of youth with desires for adventitious distinction.”38 Although Hemans and the Howitts were writing historical catalog poems at the same time as this explicitly perspectival rhetoric flourished in historical writing and instruction, the two discourses rarely echo each other. For one thing, the figurative logic of the catalog poem isn’t nearly as visual as Emma Willard’s perspectival timeline. The lyric speaker’s relation to the past is often auditory, and when the past does rise before her as a vision, it doesn’t do so in single-point perspective. For a direct literary analogue to Willard’s perspectival rhetoric—and a likely influence on it—one would do better to select the final chapter of Waverley, where Scott famously compares temporal consciousness to the perception of depth in a landscape. “[L]ike those who drift down a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made, until we fix our eye on the now distant point from which we have been drifted.”39 But my concern in this chapter is less with particular (auditory or visual) figures for historical consciousness than with the broader social logic that made subjective historical consciousness seem so central to history’s educational value. On that point, historical writing of the s and early s does strongly parallel the romantic catalog poem. Both genres suggest that the sublimity of historical consciousness resides, ultimately, in the way it dramatizes culture’s power to transcend other sources of distinction. T. B. Macaulay’s  review of William Mitford’s History of Greece is now quoted mainly for its advocacy of social and cultural history—especially for Macaulay’s remark that “historians . . . have confined themselves to the public transactions of states, and have left to the negligent administration of writers of fiction a province at least equally extensive and valuable.” But before extracting Macaulay’s historical methodology from this review, it may be worth recalling what he actually has to say about Mitford’s book, because the authors’ differences of opinion about Greek history are connected in revealing ways to Macaulay’s methodological program. According to Macaulay, Mitford’s aristocratic political opinions produce “a marked partiality for Lacedaemon, and a dislike of Athens.”40 Macaulay responds with an extended defense of Athens and of popular government which is also, less overtly, a defense of a particular model of literary and historical cultivation. Macaulay begins with the premise that “oligarchy, wherever it has existed, has always stunted the growth of genius.” In the history of Venice, for instance, “we see nothing but the state; aristocracy had destroyed every seed of genius

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and virtue.” He sees analogous consequences in Sparta: the state swallowed up every form of civilian excellence because Lycurgus “never considered that governments were made for men, and not men for governments.” Macaulay then doubles the argument back on itself by suggesting that Mitford’s historical methodology is handicapped by the same kind of blindness. Though it may seem a strange thing to say of a gentleman who has published so many quartos, Mr Mitford seems to entertain a feeling, bordering on contempt, for literary and speculative pursuits. The talents of action almost exclusively attract his notice, and he talks with very complacent disdain of “the idle learned.” Homer, indeed, he admires, but principally, I am afraid, because he is convinced that Homer could neither read nor write.41

Macaulay’s contrast between different forms of history thus grows directly out of the contrast he has developed between Sparta and Athens. Because Mitford can see nothing but “the public transactions of states,” he is inclined to celebrate a state like Sparta that suppressed everything else. But the greatness of Athens can only be appreciated by a historian who appreciates culture. Moreover, in another strange moment of self-reflexivity, it turns out that the greatness of Athenian culture is effectively the greatness of historical representation itself. It is, above all, a power to survey. The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his comrades the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man.

On a literal level this paragraph is merely about “the infinite wealth of the mental world”—a broad abstraction that might encompass any form of culture. But in practice it tends to envision the boundlessness of the mental world specifically in historical terms. Culture encompasses both the “primeval dynasties” of the past and the “yet unexplored mines” of the future. This figural emphasis makes sense because, for Macaulay, culture’s empire lies in its power to transcend time and space. “All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and every age, have been the triumphs of Athens.”42

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Macaulay hints that this portable triumph may have set up residence in England at the moment, but he ends the review with a famous peroration intended to drive home the point that the empire of culture finally transcends nationality. When those who have rivaled her [Athens’] greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilisation and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall in vain labour to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chaunted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts;—her influence and her glory will still survive,— immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.43

“Her influence and her glory will still survive” at the end of this sentence refers back to Athens, but a reader might easily attach the pronoun to England, and the slipperiness of reference is no accident. A panorama of ruined London has oddly been inserted in the middle of this sentence about Athens, in order to remind readers that British greatness rests on the same foundation as Athens’—not political or military, but cultural. This is a geopolitical claim, but it also carries—in the context of this review—pointed domestic implications. The social distinctions sought by aristocrats and political leaders (“the name of our proudest chief”) are reduced to illegible characters “on some mouldering pedestal,” while the reader is invited to identify instead with the perspective of nameless travelers who survey these ruins from the imperishable vantage point of “civilisation and knowledge.” Civilization and knowledge are imperishable, in this essay, because they are never actually incarnated in a particular nation or historical moment; they are represented instead as a perspective that has the power to survey and assimilate “the infinite wealth of the mental world”—from the “primeval dynasties” of the past to the unexplored ruins of a future London. Macaulay is inviting readers to identify with a perspective that strongly resembles the perspective sketched out in historical catalog poems. As in catalog poems, the allure of this perspective has everything to do with the way it revalues different forms of distinction. Like Macaulay’s travelers, the speakers of catalog poems are located at a distance that makes names and events illegible, revealing the hollowness not just of fame but of all the forms

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of social consequence specific to a particular place and time. At this distance, the only distinction that matters is the mental cultivation that allows an observer to rise above his or her own location and survey the diversity of human history. In Macaulay’s essays for the Edinburgh Review, this model of historical cultivation as perspective, originally championed by Joseph Priestley, distinctly displaces the older model that had relied on the instructive force of biographical example. Priestley and Macaulay are both better known for their optimism about progress than for the slightly apocalyptic perspective on the past I’ve been sketching in this chapter. But there is less conflict between the two attitudes than one might suppose. For Macaulay, at any rate, the infinite diversity of human society—which elevated “literary and speculative pursuits” over other forms of distinction—also guaranteed progress, as he explains in this passage from an  essay on history, describing Europe in the early modern era. [T]he second civilization of mankind commenced, under circumstances which afforded a strong security that it would never retrograde and never pause. Europe was now a great federal community. Her numerous states were united by the easy ties of international law and a common religion. Their institutions, their languages, their manners, their tastes in literature, their modes of education, were widely different. Their connection was close enough to allow of mutual observation and improvement, yet not so close as to destroy the idioms of national opinion and feeling. . . . The civilized world has thus been preserved from an uniformity of character fatal to all improvement. Every part of it has been illuminated with light reflected from every other. Competition has produced activity where monopoly would have produced sluggishness. The number of experiments in moral science which the speculator has an opportunity of witnessing has been increased beyond all calculation. Society and human nature, instead of being seen in a single point of view, are presented to him under ten thousand different aspects.44

Disunity ensures progress here in the same way that cultural achievement ensures immortality: it creates an infinitely complex perspective that transcends any individual form of life, because it views society “under ten thousand different aspects.” This cultural argument is admittedly complemented by an economic analogy: “competition has produced activity where monopoly would have produced sluggishness.” But this only serves as a reminder that in the s, the advocates of historical and literary cultivation were still to a great extent the same people as the advocates of political

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economy. These two branches of middle-class polemic had not yet diverged widely enough to declare unremitting war on each other.45 The panorama of ruined London at the end of Macaulay’s review of Mitford is better known in a later incarnation. Macaulay revisited the image in his  review of Ranke’s History of the Popes, transforming the “travelers from distant regions” into a traveler specifically “from New Zealand [who] shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” Anthony Trollope considered titling an unpublished work of social observation “The New Zealander,” and this tourist of the future was invoked so often by other authors that in  Punch was forced to include him in a list of “used up, exhausted, threadbare, stale, and hackneyed” literary devices. “The retirement of this veteran is indispensable. He can no longer be suffered to impede the traffic over London Bridge. Much wanted at the present time in his own country. May return when London is in ruins.” 46 Used as a comic tag, the New Zealander tended to shrink into a generic figure for the future; at least on the surface, there is little in this figure of speech to recall the apotheosis of historical culture at the end of Macaulay’s  review. As a cultural observer in a much-changed valley of the Thames, H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller is connected in a more substantive way to Macaulay’s themes, but the connection perhaps only underlines how questionable Macaulay’s assumptions had become by , since history is altogether forgotten among the Eloi and Morlocks, and culture (in the form of the Palace of Green Porcelain) is a dusty ruin to be looted for useful matches. But of course, by Wells’s time, the model of historical cultivation celebrated in essays and poems of the s had found a more secure home than literary speculation: it had been institutionalized as the organizing framework of historical and literary education.

3

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L

who don’t specialize in the nineteenth century may not realize that “English language and literature” became a subject of university instruction in London in . Even scholars who do specialize in the nineteenth century often have the impression that nothing of much significance happened in the discipline before Matthew Arnold. Thirty years ago one might have blamed this blind spot on the shadow cast by Oxbridge: formal English study didn’t begin at Oxford and Cambridge until the end of the nineteenth century, and historians were slow to recognize the institutions where it had flourished earlier in the century (serving a more provincial, colonial, or middle-class audience) as sites of intellectual leadership. Today, however, it is difficult to blame elitism or ignorance for our indifference to the early history of English studies. Over the last thirty years, scholars have richly documented the development of vernacular literary study in India, America, and Scotland, and several books have described the creation of “English language and literature” at London colleges in the s and s.1 And yet, these accounts haven’t changed English professors’ mental model of their discipline as much as one might expect. The discipline of English still largely understands itself as springing from an Arnoldian concept of culture, or—in Gerald Graff’s still-influential account—from a late nineteenth-century struggle between general culture and a professionalized research-centered university imported from Germany.2 If the teaching of English before  has attracted less attention than i t er a r y s c h o l a r s

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one might expect, one reason may be that its story has generally been told as a struggle between several familiar and well-formed disciplinary projects. “Rhetoric,” “philology,” “moral instruction,” and “belles lettres” enter the arena, but it is difficult to work up much suspense, because we all know in advance that “belles lettres” will leave victorious, marry nationalism, and give birth to the prose works of Matthew Arnold. When the disciplinary projects of the s fail to fit any of these templates, researchers commonly solve the problem by explaining that professors were confused, or torn between the competing claims of several familiar projects. Franklin Court’s Institutionalizing English Literature ()—perhaps the best existing account of early-nineteenth-century literary study—makes a good example. Court focuses on two London colleges, founded in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The University of London—which I’ll call here by its modern name, University College—began instruction in  to serve an urban, largely middle-class audience. Neither students nor faculty were required to profess a religion, and no denomination was excluded. King’s College began instruction shortly thereafter (), as an avowedly Anglican alternative in London. (Both colleges were later absorbed by the omnibus institution that now bears the name “University of London.”) From their foundation, University College and King’s College both offered instruction in “English language and literature”—a discipline that departed from the older rubric of “rhetoric and belles lettres,” I’ll suggest, above all by adopting an explicitly historical approach to language and literature. Where the institutional history of this transition is concerned, Court’s account is detailed and reliable. But he consistently interprets the intellectual projects of the discipline’s first professors as signs of confusion. Henry Rogers, for instance, who taught English at University College from  to , is introduced as someone who “seems not to have known what he wanted to do with the English chair.” According to Court, Rogers was torn between moral instruction and philology, “caught between the inclination to use literature . . . as a vehicle for promoting Christian morality . . . and his conviction that really the only sensible way to deal with language in the classroom was to analyze and parse it.” Rogers’s confusion is mirrored by confusion in a faculty senate torn between “rhetoric” and “philology.” “The senate, like Rogers, was unclear about what an English professor should do.” In fact, it’s not too sweeping a generalization to say that in Court’s narrative, the s are one long muddle, resolved only at the beginning of the s when

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professors finally make “the discovery, remarkable for the time, that the successful institutionalization of formal literary study depended to a great extent on literary criticism.”3 If this were in fact the trajectory of English instruction in the early nineteenth century, it would point to the unsurprising conclusion that English studies was from the beginning destined to become what it now is. But the real story is more surprising, because the things that seem peculiar to us about English in the s were not actually consequences of confusion. Henry Rogers thought he knew quite well what an English professor should do. As I’ll show later in this chapter, he articulated a clear rationale for the study of English language and literature, publishing parts of it in the Edinburgh Review, and parts of it in his General Introduction to a Course of Lectures on English Grammar and Composition (). Moreover, Rogers’s project was largely consistent with the rationale that had originally convinced the founders of University College to hire professors in “English Language and Literature,” and consistent with the goals of most other professors who taught at University College and King’s College in the s. Rogers seems confused only because his project—combining elements of what we call “rhetoric,” what we call “philology,” and what we call “literary history”—is so alien to us that its coherence is difficult to recognize. The problem is not that this project lacked a purpose. Rhetorical practice, language study, and literary history were in fact firmly organized around the central premise that students needed to understand the history of English literature, from its origin to the present, in order to write well. It was a coherent educational project, with a practical aim borrowed from rhetoric, although its attempt to produce rhetorical mastery through historical study may now seem implausible to us. The goal seems implausible, I will argue, partly because it organizes the discipline according to a different historical logic than the one we’re familiar with. English professors still trust—or, at any rate, hope—that studying literary history will enrich students’ mastery of the language. But instead of cultivating that mastery simply by exposing students to a broad range of good models, the syllabi of the s asked them specifically to explain the transitions that linked each stage of linguistic development to the next. What strains our credulity, I think, is the notion that students need a complete, continuous explanation of long-term historical change in order to write well. We tend to balk, in other words, at what appears to us an overvaluation of historical continuity.

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As previous chapters of this book have attempted to show, a very different model of education was already circulating in novels and poems, which celebrated historical cultivation by dramatizing the dizzying gulfs of change or oblivion a cultivated mind had to internalize. By the early nineteenth century, this model of cultivation was even beginning to affect historical handbooks and timelines, which sometimes conveyed historical perspective, paradoxically, by highlighting the necessary ignorance it entailed. But dramatizing paradox in a timeline, or a poem, is one thing; explicitly founding a new discipline on paradox is a riskier enterprise. For that reason, I would suggest, the professors who taught English literary history in the s at first clung to an older and more rationalistic model of historical cultivation—one that insisted on the useful continuity of past and present. Only in the s did this developmental rationale for English studies give way to one founded on the paradox (which we no longer find paradoxical) that students could best grasp the unity of English literature by studying a succession of distinct and incommensurable “period styles.” This shift required professors to develop a new kind of course: a course that spent an entire term unfolding the character of a single literary period. Period survey courses became the mainstay of undergraduate coursework in English in the second half of the nineteenth century, and they retain that role today. Their centrality in the undergraduate curriculum is linked to a set of customs that tend to organize the whole profession of literary study around periodization: new professors are often hired to cover a particular period, for which reason graduate students are usually encouraged to shape their research around a period rubric. Broader patterns of disciplinary communication (in conferences, journals, and so on) are in turn strongly shaped by the central role of periodization in hiring and professional development. At present, these different aspects of periodization interlock and reinforce each other in a circular way: it would be difficult to say whether periodization is sustained most importantly by its role in the undergraduate curriculum, in graduate specialization, or in organizing research. But historically, it is easy to see that the curriculum came first: period surveys reshaped the undergraduate curriculum long before any English professor had the luxury of specializing in a period. Period surveys were not offered by English departments until the s. The courses offered in the s had always endeavored to cover the full sweep of English literary history in a single term. Moreover, these courses stressed

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the causal connections between broad stages of development rather than the distinct character of narrowly defined periods. Frederick Denison Maurice seems to have been the first professor to design courses that isolated single periods of literary history for sustained exploration; in the early s, this became the dominant mode of literary instruction at King’s College, where he taught. Over the course of the next two decades the period-survey course was adopted by professors of English at University College, and as other institutions created departments of English later in the century, they too adopted a period-centered curriculum. Because the choice to emphasize periodization was made so early in the history of the discipline, subsequent generations of literary scholars have rarely seen it as a choice at all, and a period-centered curriculum may now seem an inevitable logistical convenience. But the structure of literary education in the s was equally well suited to the kind of knowledge the discipline was then seeking to produce, which focused on genetic connections rather than contrasts. Moreover, the shift from developmentally-organized courses to period surveys was motivated, not by staffing problems or logistical convenience, but by an explicitly-articulated belief that middle-class students needed a kind of perspective that only historical contrast could provide. Maurice expounded this opinion at length in his published writings, and its effect on his courses can be reconstructed from examinations and letters in the unpublished archives of King’s College. The emergence of the first period surveys thus casts light, not just on the structure of the curriculum, but on the transformation of basic assumptions about the cultural purpose of literary education.

Better Writing Through Etymology In the late eighteenth century, literary texts were taught primarily as rhetorical models. In keeping with that purpose, they were commonly organized by genre or audience. Hugh Blair’s lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, first published in , are typical. If a student needs to know how to speak at the bar, Blair invites him to read Cicero. If the student needs epistolary grace, he is urged to consult the letters of “Mr. Pope, Dean Swift, and their friends.” Anthologies of vernacular literature that anticipated schoolroom use, like Elegant Extracts, followed a similar plan of organization, emphasizing genre, audience, and theme.4 In these anthologies and textbooks, chronology is largely ignored; there was, after all, no obvious reason why

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chronology should matter for students who were reading in order to become better speakers and writers. In the late s, when colleges began to hire the first professors of English Language and Literature, the rationale for studying literature was still primarily that it made students better writers. But the new courses were organized historically, rather than by genre—a decision with fateful consequences for the discipline. The rationale for chronological organization was drawn, not from literary history, but from a historical transformation of rhetoric itself. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the notion had taken root that students needed to understand the progressive development of language and literature in order to write well. More specifically, effective writing depended on understanding the origins and history of individual words. When the historical study of literature was institutionalized in the s, it was justified largely as an extension of this existing rhetorical project. These stages in the historical transformation of vernacular literary study have not been widely understood, because historians of the discipline tend to describe all historical approaches to language as forms of “philology,” and then assume that “philology” must have appealed to contemporaries by promising inductive, scientistic rigor. This makes it hard to discern the motivations that actually governed instruction. The term “philology” becomes appropriate by the s, but it can be a misleading rubric for English studies in the earlier part of the century, since it tends to evoke a kind of inductive research that was not yet common in England. While scholars like Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm were laying the foundations of comparative philology on the European continent, English language study remained dominated by John Horne Tooke.5 Tooke’s approach to language was radically historical: indeed, he argued that it was crucial to understand the history of language in order to speak and reason clearly. But he did not adopt the inductive approach we associate with modern philology, comparing languages in order to deduce patterns of phonetic change. In Tooke’s hands, language history was a prescriptive science of the mind, linked more closely to John Locke and Etienne de Condillac than to a figure like Grimm. Tooke’s reputation rests on ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΑ, or the Diversions of Purley (, ), a two-volume treatise on language thinly disguised as a dialogue between Tooke and several friends. The dialogue begins with a discussion of grammar, a subject Tooke recommends as “absolutely necessary in the search after philosophical truth.” But Tooke also insists that knowledge of grammar

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can be obtained “by a plain man of sense without what is commonly called Learning.” Instead of exhaustively classifying parts of speech, the plain man of sense merely needs to understand the fundamental relationship between words and ideas. Most grammarians go wrong by assuming that every word stands for exactly one corresponding idea. But in fact, Tooke argues, many classes of words are merely “abbreviations employed for despatch,” as “the signs of other words.”6 These abbreviations are the “wings of thought”—the “winged words” alluded to in Tooke’s Greek title. In the rest of his treatise, Tooke proceeds to argue that nouns and verbs alone are the original parts of speech; all the other parts of speech can be understood as abbreviated combinations of nouns and verbs. Tooke’s treatise reshaped the study of language in Great Britain for a generation. As Hans Aarslef puts it, The reputation of Tooke’s Diversions is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the intellectual and scholarly life of England during the first third of the nineteenth century. For thirty years it kept England immune to the new philology until the results and methods finally had to be imported from the Continent in the s, and even then they met strong opposition.7

The power of Tooke’s example depended, not on the strength of his etymological evidence, but on the prescriptive rhetorical conclusions his theory seemed to license. To analyze inflections and parts of speech into their component ideas, Tooke suggests, is to strike a blow against empty abstractions, and to reveal a more intelligible language of “separate and distinct ideas” that is still present although hidden within our own “corrupted” language.8 In the context of the s, this theory had clear radical associations. Tooke was active in reformist politics—he was, among other things, one of the defendants tried for treason in —and he was not at all reticent about his political commitments in The Diversions of Purley. Tooke’s etymologies of “right” and “law,” for instance, trace the words back to the root idea of “command,” while taking care to distinguish what is commanded “by princes or ministers or the corrupted sham representatives of a people” from “that which is ordered, commanded, or laid down by God, human nature, or the constitution of this government.”9 Here the concept of “law” is made concrete in order to reveal how reverence for a word can betray the reality it is meant to represent. Tooke’s attacks on “a metaphysical jargon and a false morality, which can only be dissipated by etymology” have something in common (as

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Olivia Smith has argued) with Thomas Paine’s refusal to let thought remain “immured in the Bastille of a word.”10 But the radical implications of Tooke’s argument do not seem to have limited his influence in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Tooke’s attempt to correct language by restoring it to its substantive foundations was, after all, a continuation of a project with a long history in Britain—extending from Francis Bacon through John Locke to much eighteenth-century natural philosophy. It may be true that this empirical project often entailed a tacit skepticism about the claims of established authority. But if so, it was by the s a skepticism too deeply ingrained in British intellectual tradition to be uprooted by a decade or two of reaction. In any case, the innovation that Tooke himself deserves most credit for—the notion that the substantive foundations of language could be recovered historically, through etymology—was not perceived as inherently radical. Early-nineteenth-century philosophers of language, like Walter Whiter, did not feel that they had to adopt Tooke’s politics in order to adopt his emphasis on etymology.11 But although early-nineteenth-century language study was not organized around a consistent set of political principles, it was still at bottom a prescriptive science, which aimed to improve rhetorical practice by uncovering the substantive foundations of language. The best way to trace this is to focus on the pedagogically influential but now almost ignored genre of “books of synonymy.” Romanticists are familiar with S. T. Coleridge’s penchant for “desynonymization”—his habit of doing intellectual work by establishing a distinction between terms commonly used as synonyms. “Fancy” and “imagination” are the best-known examples, but James McKusick has pointed out that the gesture was already second nature for Coleridge in .12 In fact, Coleridge was only a particularly creative and self-conscious practitioner of a technique that had been promoted as an element of cultivated style ever since “books of synonymy” began to appear in the middle of the eighteenth century. The first English one appears to be The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous, in the English Language () by John Trusler, a prolific abridger and writer of self-improvement books. Trusler borrowed the basic idea of the genre, and a certain amount of content as well, from Synonymes François () by the abbé Gabriel Girard. The modern equivalent of this work would be a thesaurus, but books of synonymy weren’t designed to be used as college freshmen use thesauri—to permit elegant variation. They weren’t arranged alphabetically, for one thing: you had to read them through. Moreover, notice

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that Trusler didn’t advertise his book as a guide to synonyms but to words esteemed synonymous: books of synonymy underlined distinctions, in order to save you from the gaffe of offering someone counsel when you were really offering advice or admonishment. The end of admonition, is gentle reproof. Advice and counsel, are to convey instruction; but with this difference, that advice, implies no superiority with respect either to rank or parts, in the person who gives it; whereas, counsel, generally, carries with it one, if not both.13

Trusler’s book went through at least five editions between the s and the s. Interestingly, in  the title changed. Instead of The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous it becomes The Distinction Between Words Esteemed Synonymous. Some might call this a distinction without a difference, but perhaps Trusler had succeeded in raising (his own) standards of precise diction. Hester Piozzi came out with a similar but livelier guide in the s, and several others came out in the early nineteenth century. Books of synonymy were seen as a significant part of literary culture; they were reviewed in venues like the Quarterly Review.14 Etymology had no place in the eighteenth century books of synonymy by Girard, Trusler, and Piozzi. But it became central to early nineteenth-century examples of the genre. Here are a few typical entries in English Synonyms Discriminated (), by William Taylor, an influential book that was still being reprinted as late as . Keen (german kühn) is etymologically connected with the icelandish kinn, the jaw, the grinders . . . it originally signifies strong of jaw, able to bite, hungry, voracious. . . . Metaphorically it is applied to those who know how to get their bread in the world; who possess a somewhat eager appetite for the means of maintenance. . . . Sharp is etymologically connected with share, the cutter of a plough, and shears . . . He is sharp who is cutting, he is acute who is piercing, in his observations; he is keen, who has an interested purpose in making them. Acuteness announces penetration, sharpness an ungentle temper; and keenness a selfish rapacity.15

Taylor is working on the Tookean premise that “every word . . . must at first have represented a sensible idea.”16 So keen, for instance, is fundamentally about jaws, whereas sharp is about a cutting edge—and, Taylor seems to imply, these words should still be used with an awareness of the underlying

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metaphor. Little survives here of Tooke’s political project. What does survive is a vivid sense of the historical distance separating the literal and metaphorical senses of words. Taylor suggests that writers need to be aware of that distance in order to write effective, idiomatic prose. Ripeness. Maturity. Ripeness is saxon and maturity is latin for the same idea; both describe fullness of growth in fruit. But, with the usual fortune of such duplicates in our language, the native word is commonly applied in the proper, and the foreign word in the metaphoric sense. The ripeness of an orange. The maturity of a project. . . . These applications could change places; but there would be something of pedantry in saying ‘a mature apricot,’ the derivation would be to recollect: and there would be something of eloquence in saying ‘a ripe judgment,’ the metaphor would be thrust into observation.17

Taylor is not confining usage here, but trying to give writers meaningful choices. The idea is that by paying attention to etymology, a writer can make the figurative dimension of his language more or less salient, and tailor it to scholarly or oratorical purposes as needed. Passages like this, which are frequent in English Synonyms Discriminated, helped initiate an educational project that flourished all the way through the twentieth century, remaining salient in Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”—the project of encouraging writers to be constantly aware of the Latinate or Germanic coloring of their diction. In the twenty-first century, this etymological project has dwindled into a relatively minor feature of English instruction, but in the early nineteenth century it provided a central motive for reorganizing the study of vernacular language and literature as a historical discipline. When English Language and Literature was introduced as a university subject in the s, the chief rationale for approaching the subject historically was that writers needed to understand the history of their language in order to use its rhetorical resources. For instance, the Council of the University of London issued a statement in  explaining the aims of the fledgling institution, and the major divisions of its proposed course of study. This was probably the first institutional document to name “English Language and Literature” as one of “those subjects which constitute the essential parts of a liberal education.” Not surprisingly, the Council’s justification for the new subject was closely modeled on existing justifications for rhetorical study: their primary aim was to make students better writers. The same practical

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goal justified a comparative and historical approach to language, but it did so through an odd parenthesis: “the comparison of various languages, makes each of them better understood, and illustrates the affinity of nations, while it enlarges and strengthens the understanding.”18 It is easy to see how making language “better understood” could strengthen rhetorical skills. But how does the study of language “illustrate the affinity of nations,” and why should those “affinities” matter, practically, to a writer? The short answer to that question is “etymology.” To understand how etymology was in practice supposed to improve writing, we need to ask how English language and literature was actually taught at the London colleges in the first few years of their existence. Fortunately, these institutions have preserved a rich trove of documentation in their college “calendars” or catalogs, especially course descriptions and exams. In characterizing these documents, I’ll often refer to “the London colleges” collectively—although King’s College was founded in explicit (Anglican) opposition to the nondenominational University College. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the discipline of English studies was so young, and departments were so small, that curricula were defined less by institutional tradition than by individual hiring decisions, and faculty sometimes moved from one institution to another. For instance, the first professor of English at University College, Thomas Dale, was hired in  only to resign in  and accept an appointment as the first professor of English at King’s College. So in the s, it often makes sense to refer to both institutions collectively. A few descriptions survive of Dale’s course at University College, but a set of prize examinations from  preserved at King’s College give more detailed evidence about his pedagogical practice, and thus probably indicate how English was taught in the early years of both institutions. In the academic year –, Dale seems to have taught junior-level courses on “English Language” and “The Principles and Practice of English Composition,” as well as a senior-level course on “English Philology and Rhetoric” and a course on “English Literature” open to juniors and seniors alike. The prize examinations for all four of these courses suggest an emphasis on the genesis of the English language, and especially on its relationship to ancestral sources. The senior exam on “philology and rhetoric” asks students to distinguish classes of English nouns derived from Saxon, French, Greek, and Latin.19 The junior exam on language asks students to “give examples of English verbs derived . from the Saxon, . from the Latin, . from the

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Greek.”20 Even the exam on Literature asks students to divide literary history into periods that emphasize the genesis of English from a fusion of Saxon and Norman French: “Pure Saxon,” “Norman-Saxon,” “Incipient English,” and “Progressive English.”21 Dale’s exam on “Principles and Practice of English Composition” might at first seem free of this obsession with linguistic genesis. But in reading the exam, one also needs to read between the lines for the intended answers. Consider, for instance, question number five: “Distinguish accurately between the apparent synonyms, affront, insult; uncover, discover, detect; attraction, allurement; effective, efficient, efficacious, effectual; recall, repeal, revoke, call back.”22 This question isn’t overtly etymological. But I have been able to trace each of these sets of words to a separate article in William Taylor’s English Synonyms Discriminated, which must have been used as a textbook in Dale’s composition course. Moreover, Dale seems to have chosen several articles that specifically illustrate the etymological thesis we’ve already seen dramatized in Taylor’s distinction between “ripeness” and “maturity”—that is, Taylor’s belief that words from different ancestral sources need to be used with a tacit consciousness of their national origin. Here, for instance, is Taylor on “recall, repeal, revoke, call back”: To recall is english, to repeal is french (rapeller) and to revoke is latin (revocare) for the same idea to call back. Our conversation is english: we recall our directions to servants, and other family arrangements. Our laws are french: we repeal acts of parliament, and exiles of the state. Our oratory is latin: we revoke a panegyric, a denunciation, a promise, or a threat.23

In short, the study of English was felt to illustrate “the affinity of nations” because etymology was taught, not merely as evidence about the past, but as a sign of the living and persistent presence of other national traditions (including the long-vanished rulers of Normandy and Rome) inside English language and society. We “repeal” laws because “our laws are french.” By uncovering those international connections, the etymologist could restore a vivid and concrete meaning obscured by time. This rhetorical application of etymology played a pivotal role in the English curriculum throughout the s. The notion that students needed to understand the origins of words in order to use them effectively justified the relatively new fields of literary and linguistic history by connecting them to the practical and time-honored aims of rhetoric. What otherwise would students gain from reading Caedmon? The

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premise that etymology had rhetorical force not only bound Thomas Dale’s courses on language, literature, and composition to each other, but permitted their goals to fuse in a capstone senior course on “English Philology and Rhetoric”—treated as reciprocal aspects of a single subject. Toward the beginning of the decade (for instance in the courses of Thomas Dale), the rhetorical value ascribed to etymology was still modeled on the theories of Horne Tooke. Since all words were originally concrete ideas, tracing them back to their origin was simply a way of clarifying their true, substantial meaning. But as this pedagogical project matured, professors increasingly sought to clarify its practical application by producing a set of easily-taught general rules about the relative advantages of Saxon and Latin words. Henry Rogers, for instance, who taught English language and literature at University College from  to , argued in the Edinburgh Review that the secret of a cultivated style lay in judicious diction, because To know how to employ, in the due degree and on the proper occasions, either the Saxon or the classical elements of our language; when to aim at strength and when at refinement of expression—to be energetic without coarseness and polished without affectation—is the most conclusive proof of a highly cultivated taste.24

Rogers recommended Saxon words especially to “the orator and the poet,” and Latin to writers who sought refinement, politeness, or philosophic abstraction. 25 His published lectures stress the importance of audience: “the staple of all discourses intended for the people should be words derived from the Saxon.”26 Rogers’s successor at University College, R. G. Latham, also stressed that writers needed to understand the “derivation” of words in order to use them correctly.27 But in the s, belief in the rhetorical value of etymology was not by any means restricted to professors. S. T. Coleridge suggested in  that “a composite language like the English” might be “a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German,” because the profusion of “Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes” permits “a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings.”28 Thomas DeQuincey eventually expanded this insight into a set of rhetorical rules. “Simple narration, and a pathos resting upon artless circumstances,—elementary feelings,—homely and household affections,—these are most suitably managed by the old indigenous Saxon vocabulary. But a passion which rises into grandeur, which is complex, elaborate, and interveined with high

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meditative feelings, would languish or absolutely halt, without aid from the Latin moiety of our language.”29 When contemporary historians of English studies describe nineteenthcentury preoccupation with linguistic origins, they often sum the phenomenon up as “racial” or “nationalistic” in a way that blurs distinctions between significantly different projects. This is partly true, for instance, even in Franklin Court’s work on the topic. Court treats R. G. Latham (hired at University College in ) as a figure who introduced a fateful preoccupation with “cultural origins” to a philological curriculum that had previously been blandly factual, thereby producing a “critical discourse that centered on concepts of ‘nationality.’”30 Court is absolutely right to draw attention to Latham’s work in comparative ethnology. But it isn’t the case that Latham was the first English professor to emphasize nationality and cultural origins. As we have seen, those themes were central from the moment the first professor of English was hired at University College. It would be better to say that Latham represents the leading edge of an ethnic, and often racial, interpretation of nationality—an interpretation that would later give rise to remarks like Matthew Arnold’s famous generalizations about the competing “Celtic” and “Teutonic” elements of English character. In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, language study was profoundly concerned with tracing national genealogy. But it rarely made much effort to found its account of linguistic history on durable ethnic or racial essences. William Taylor, for instance, doesn’t suggest that the Romans were an inherently abstract and the Saxons an inherently earthy people; rather, he says that this is how their words have been used in English—according to “the usual fortune of such duplicates in our language, the native word is commonly applied in the proper, and the foreign word in the metaphoric sense.”31 For that matter, the prominence of nationality in this discourse tells us less than we might assume about its motivations. The rhetorical uses of etymology didn’t—in the first half of the nineteenth century—usually entail a simple preference for “native” over “foreign” vocabulary, such as we see, for instance, in E. B. White’s advice: “Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words.” This advice—added to The Elements of Style by White in —is not only more essentialist than the advice professors were giving in the s (inasmuch as it attributes liveliness to the Anglo-Saxon language itself), but less useful, inasmuch as it urges the student to avoid a huge swath of the dictionary. The view that prevailed in the s was subtler:

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students should use Saxon and Latin words freely, but use them on different occasions and for different purposes. The richness of the “composite” English language was often praised, and the point of tracing English words to different sources was not to extol a single, enduring spirit of “Englishness.” The implicit lesson was, on the contrary, that a cultivated writer needed to be familiar with many vanished nations (Saxons, Romans, Normans, Greeks) and to understand the roles they had respectively played in the formation of British customs, laws, and learned discourse. In short, the emerging discipline of English studies was organized around assumptions that were at the same time nationalist and historicist. The English curriculum was explicitly designed to foster national selfconsciousness (expressed practically, as mastery of English style). But it also emphasized that national character was a mutable and composite thing, formed over time by contributions from several different nations—a premise that incidentally allowed English professors to borrow the prestige of classical scholarship, and to approach Anglo-Saxon with similar scholarly ambitions. The tension between nationalistic and antiquarian dimensions of this curriculum made the notion of developmental unity absolutely central. Questions about the comparative structure of Saxon and Latin verbs could be justified as contributing to the student’s mastery of modern English only if all past phases of linguistic development were understood to leave permanent traces in the present. Not surprisingly, summaries of English courses from the s tend to underline developmental continuity; Thomas Dale, for instance, divided his course on English literature into periods, but gave the periods names—“Norman-Saxon,” “Incipient English,” “Progressive English”—that define a straightforward through-line from the gradual dissolution of old languages to the gradual emergence of a new one.

The First Period Survey Courses When English literature was taught at universities in the s and s, the whole panorama of English literary history was always covered in a single term. Outside of the academy, there were certainly precedents for a slower and more period-centered approach to literature: William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (), for instance, approximate the pace and scope of a modern “period survey” course, which spends a whole semester exploring a single period of literary history. But I can find no record

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of similar experiments at universities until the s. At first glance, this might plausibly be explained as a consequence of limited staffing: at both King’s College and University College, the department of English consisted of a single professor, who had to teach courses on language and rhetoric as well as literature. But invoking department size as an explanation would make it very hard to understand how period surveys were introduced in the s, because the size of English departments did not increase. F. D. Maurice introduced a periodized curriculum at King’s College without hiring additional staff, as I’ll shortly explain, simply by admitting that he wouldn’t be able to cover all of English literary history. It appears that professors compressed English literature into a single term in the s because they were genuinely committed to covering it all sequentially: the educational rationale of the discipline demanded that national history be transmitted as a unified whole. Details about “Norman-Saxon” language and literature had practical utility only insofar as they could be connected to a developmental narrative that (at least ostensibly) fostered a mastery of present-day English style. Disjointed pieces of the story would have nothing but an antiquarian interest. Why didn’t English professors immediately grasp that conveying period character could be, in itself, a worthy educational project? It’s not as though early-nineteenth-century writers lacked interest in periodization, or in the concept of period style. On the contrary, the notion that each period is animated by a distinct “spirit of the age” was notoriously central to earlynineteenth-century criticism from William Hazlitt to P. B. Shelley to J. S. Mill. What professors lacked in the s was a model of personal cultivation organized around this concept: to put it bluntly, no one had yet advanced a theory of education that explained why periodization was good for you. So there was no reason to organize a curriculum around it. F. D. Maurice played a pivotal role, both in articulating such a theory, and in creating the first period survey courses. In other words, he helped fundamentally reshape the theory of historical cultivation that underpinned the discipline of English studies, and invented a structure that the curriculum retains to this day. For all of these reasons, I think Maurice deserves a much larger role in the history of the discipline than he has yet received. In the context of nineteenth-century Anglican theology, of course, Maurice is far from obscure. He has a central place in the history of Christian socialism and of the Broad Church movement; his dismissal from King’s College in , for theological heterodoxy, made him a cause célèbre among liberal Victorians.

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He is also well known as a founder of colleges for working men and women (including The Working Men’s College, and Queen’s College for the education of governesses). Nor have his years teaching English at King’s College (from  to ) been entirely ignored. In his study of English at the London colleges, Franklin Court recognizes Maurice’s commitment to literary history as a mode of spiritual development. Court also rightly senses that Maurice put a new kind of emphasis on the historical dimension of literature. But the nature of this innovation has been misunderstood ever since Alan Bacon contrasted Maurice (who was hired to teach both English and Modern History) to Thomas Dale, who supposedly “seems to have gone out of his way to keep literature and history as separate as possible.”32 Court echoes Bacon’s judgment on this point: “Dale had separated literature and history; Maurice combined them.”33 In fact, Thomas Dale had always taught English literature historically: he organized it chronologically, divided it into periods, and insisted on the connection between literary works and great national events. Moreover, Maurice proposed to connect literature and history through the same medium Dale had used: the history of language. In his inaugural lecture, Maurice announces that “we shall find [in] the study of words and constructions, the very link between literature and history, between the particular book we are reading and the age in which that book was written.”34 This remark is distinguished from Dale’s approach only in what it leaves out: Maurice makes no reference to a larger developmental narrative, but seems to assume that the historian’s task is complete as soon as he has linked the language of a particular text to the spirit of its age. The hint provided by this negative evidence is borne out by the record of Maurice’s teaching. Maurice never attempted to survey English literature in a single term. He began, in fact, by teaching a course solely on the “Prologue” to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In subsequent years he settled into a rhythm that more closely approximated the modern “period survey,” teaching courses on, for instance, the Elizabethan period, Jacobean literature, and the reign of George III. This contraction of the syllabus was accompanied by a change in the historical content of Maurice’s courses. The historical questions on Dale’s literature exams had always emphasized processes of transformation that linked one period to the next. “What are the two principal features that marked the conversion of Saxon into English?” he asks in . On the same exam he asks students to “mention the four writers who contributed most effectually to the formation and improvement of the English language in the

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fifteenth century.”35 Maurice by contrast asked synchronic questions, asking students to recognize the characteristic stylistic or social attributes of a single period. In an exam on Jacobean literature, he asks “In what respect do the writings of Ben Jonson bear the impress of this period?” Teaching the Tudors he asks, “Write an essay on the connection between the politics and the literature of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.”36 The remarkably contemporary sound of these questions, by contrast to Dale’s, has a lot to do with their insistence on defining a period instead of tracing progress. The net effect of these changes was to abandon the emphasis on developmental unity that had, up to this point, anchored the English curriculum. As I’ve already mentioned, Maurice had to face the same staffing contraints Dale had confronted. Until , when he hired an assistant, Maurice was the only professor of English at King’s College. Moreover, Maurice was responsible for Modern History as well as English. If he chose to teach Chaucer, or Poetry from Pope to Cowper, it meant in practice that all other aspects of English literary history would be neglected for that term. Nor did Maurice make an effort to reconstruct a developmental narrative by linking terms together—say, by teaching courses in chronological order. If the evidence of his exams is any indication, Maurice taught period surveys as self-contained units, as if the comprehension of a single period could be, in isolation, a meaningful educational goal. It is worth asking how Maurice arrived at this conclusion, since there was little or no precedent for it in the discipline. Fortunately Maurice published a treatise about education in , Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? The book intervened in a debate that had grown acute in the second half of the s, as radicals and Whigs put forward a series of proposals to establish state supervision of schools (or, more ambitiously, a secular system of national education). Maurice responded that modern education must be at once a Christian and a national project, and implied that the Established Church rather than the State should retain authority over it. But the book’s relevance for the history of English studies comes not from this thesis, but from the effort Maurice makes along the way to distinguish between kinds of education appropriate for different classes. Maurice strives to get ahead of secular reform proposals by proposing his own plan for the education of the middle classes. University education, according to Maurice, is properly restricted to the professions. A profession he defines as “that kind of business which deals primarily with men as men, and is thus distinguished

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from a Trade which provides for the external wants or occasions of men.”37 In practice, he seems to be thinking of clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and statesmen. In order to form men who possess “the secret of acting upon the hearts and reason of men,” university education is concerned with the universal attributes of human nature, and thus with Latin and Greek, as the languages that best illustrate the universal principles of language as such.38 By contrast, the education of tradesmen and yeomen should be explicitly national in character, emphasizing English language, literature, and history. Maurice argues that the English middle classes need instruction in literature in order to counteract a modern tendency for middle-class interests to contract to the domain of immediate personal gain—prefiguring an argument that would be made twenty years later and more famously by Matthew Arnold. But Maurice describes the broadening power of literature with a candor that has more in common with Pierre Bourdieu. The demand for middle-class education, according to Maurice, is in effect a demand for distinction (or “position,” as he puts it), founded on a sense “that it is a great advantage to know a multitude of those things which soften the manners and make the world respectable and refined.” But expressed as a vague longing for refinement, this demand misses the vital secret of aristocratic distinction, which depends above all on “a sense of connection with a family which has preserved its honour through many generations.” Distinction, in other words, depends on a sense of collective antiquity, and in order to satisfy middle-class craving for distinction, education for tradesmen must provide an analogous sense of national (and specifically middle-class) antiquity. Doing this will not only assuage wounded pride, but genuinely enlarge middle-class interests to encompass the nation. “The town spirit” may present itself to you as a very mean, beggarly thing, living only in the moment, unconnected with the past and the future. But the moment you bring the townsman of one age to feel himself connected with the townsman of another . . . that moment this meanness and narrowness disappear. The busy member of the particular corporation . . . belongs to burghers of another day, his corporation takes its place in the history of corporations, and bears upon the life of the nation.39

In order to develop this sense of historical connection, Maurice recommends that the children of tradesmen should attend middle schools where they study English language, literature, and history. But he stresses that history should

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be presented in an unsystematic way, “giving no sort of course of history, but bringing before them particular transactions or series of transactions, illustrating them by the poetry of the period in which they occurred, and attaching them so far as [the teacher] can to localities with which they are themselves familiar.”40 In short, the goal will not be to transmit history as a connected narrative, but simply to “bring the townsman of one age to feel himself connected with the townsman of another,” in an imaginative confrontation that leaps across the intervening centuries. This plan closely resembles the curriculum Maurice designed the following year, when he was hired to teach English and Modern History. Of course, King’s College was not a middle school for tradesmen, and Maurice’s inaugural lecture accordingly begins by conceding that his own disciplines should be understood as subordinate (in this context) to the study of the classical languages—which form, with Mathematics and Theology, “the ground-work of a College education.” But when he does describe the English courses he proposes to teach, he outlines a plan that is very similar to the one in his book. Lectures in English will not take the form of a connected narrative; instead, each term will be devoted “to the minute and critical study of some English author; primarily for the purpose of getting acquainted with his language; but secondarily, and by means of this, with the spirit of the book, with the character of the author, and with the age in which he wrote.”41 Maurice’s book had proposed to focus on “particular” historical “transactions,” illustrated by the poetry of the age where they occurred; in this lecture, his focus falls more specifically on individual authors. But the underlying imperative in both cases is clearly that students should get “acquainted” with the language and spirit of a particular vanished era. And this emphasis only became clearer in the early s, as his English courses rapidly expanded to focus on periods rather than individual authors. Maurice’s inaugural lecture also interprets literary history in a way that reinforces and expands the class-conscious rationale for English study he had offered in Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? Maurice announces that his first course will focus on Chaucer because the age of Chaucer dramatizes the essentially bourgeois foundation of English nationality: “it is . . . to that age of England in which the middle class began to appear, that we owe the recovery of our language, and with it the commencement of our literature.” Moreover, he explains that the middle class was (paradoxically) from its very origin a peculiarly historical class. “The

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class which was rising up in England was never content to look upon itself as a new class. It asserted its connexion with the oldest form of English life,” for which reason the earliest expressions of English literature were chronicles and histories.42 To return to the age of Chaucer in search of a middle-class origin is thus to re-enact the backward-looking project of Chaucer’s own age. In short, Maurice not only declines to transmit literary culture as a continuous narrative, but affirms that English nationality itself has never been transmitted as a continuous tradition. It has always been constituted, from the very beginning, as an imaginative re-creation of a remote past. It was crucial for the future of English studies that the transmission of national culture should be defined as a task that depends on the vivid evocation of vanished worlds. If literature plays a privileged role in late-nineteenthcentury debates about national culture, it is partly because Maurice’s premises about education had come to be taken for granted. Culture could not be transmitted simply through social continuity, or by historical narratives that aimed to represent such continuity. Specific moments of the past had to be resurrected and made to live for students, with a vividness that only literary works could provide. How, then, did Maurice arrive at his new model of education? In one sense, I suppose I might answer that question simply by gesturing at the previous chapters of this book, which have endeavored to show how historical cultivation came to require a conscious embrace of historical discontinuity. We have already seen novelists of the Regency era imagine historical cultivation as a character’s discovery of the gaps and contrasts that separate him from the past. We have seen Emma Willard argue that instruction in history should teach students, not just to reproduce a dated list, but to internalize a sense of historical “perspective” that highlights the remoteness and obscurity of vanished eras. We have seen romantic catalog poems represent history through disconnected, dizzying glimpses of widely separated points in time. All of this background, certainly, is relevant to the model of historical cultivation Maurice proposed in the s. But since professors in the s had also, presumably, read Walter Scott and Felicia Hemans, there remains an open question about the immediate trigger for change in the early s. Why did the romantic impulse to cultivate historical discontinuity shape Maurice’s educational practice when it hadn’t shaped the teaching of his immediate predecessors? One clue lies in Maurice’s tendency to represent historical cultivation as

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a cure for a specifically middle-class amnesia. This thesis had recently been popularized by a pair of influential French historians, Augustin Thierry and François Guizot. Thierry’s historical works of the s began to suggest that there was a forgotten sort of valor in medieval burghers’ struggle for independence. In Lettres sur l’histoire de France (nd ed., ), Thierry wrote that “we have been long preceded, in the quest for civil liberty, by those townsmen of the middle ages who six hundred years ago restored the walls and the civilization of the ancient cities. . . . One must not imagine that the middle classes or popular classes were born yesterday . . .”43 Guizot developed this suggestion into a broadly-sketched history of civilization that identified the middle classes with national self-consciousness, and explicitly dramatized the need for a recovery of middle-class memory. Playing a prominent role in French politics throughout his adult life, Guizot eventually served as Prime Minister; in the s he was associated with the Doctrinaires, a group of liberal royalist intellectuals. Thus, as Pierre Rosanvallon has explained, Guizot’s history of the bourgeoisie was explicitly designed to encourage middle-class political action. “In recovering this memory [of their past civic role], they are invited to return to the origin of their political timidity in order to overcome it.”44 Maurice cites both Thierry and Guizot in his later writings, and indeed it would have been strange if a professor hired to teach Modern History in  had not already browsed their works. Maurice’s writings of  and  don’t directly cite, but do strongly echo Guizot in identifying the middle classes as the source of English national identity, and in calling for a recovery of middleclass memory. They resemble Guizot as well in their habit of imagining history as a face-to-face confrontation across the centuries that may, in Maurice’s words, “bring the townsman of one age to feel himself connected with the townsman of another.” The “Seventh Lecture” of Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe introduces the theme of middle-class history with a passage that brilliantly dramatizes such a confrontation. Guizot first imagines “a burgher of the twelfth century” visiting a French city in , where he is confused by the Third Estate’s combination of bold rhetoric and military weakness. He then invites his audience, “burghers of the nineteenth century,” to return to the twelfth, in order to witness “a converse but absolutely parallel double spectacle,” dramatizing the military valor but theoretical humility of the medieval townsmen.45 Of course Walter Scott is the spirit who presides over these scenes of vividly embodied historical tourism, and it is no accident

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that the chapter proceeds to comment on Scott’s portrait of the bourgeoisie in Quentin Durward. Thierry had also been profoundly influenced by Scott, paying homage to the novelist in his greatest work, Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (), both with an explicit tip of the hat in the introduction, and by defining his own purpose throughout the history as that of giving an embodied reality to historical abstractions. “One has to pierce through to men,” he writes, “across the distance of centuries; one has to imagine them alive and active on the land where today even the dust of their bones has been lost; and it is for this reason that so many local details and forgotten names have been included in this account.”46 For that matter, Thierry and Guizot probably owe their specific interest in the history of middle-class valor at least partly to Scott. Guizot criticizes Scott’s depiction of a medieval townsman in Quentin Durward, and it’s true that Scott often caricatures the bourgeoisie. But it’s also true, more broadly, that the revelation at the heart of Scott’s best novels always involves the surprisingly heroic role that apparently unheroic people have played in history, and although a fair amount of the limelight goes to the landed gentry, the middle classes often (as in Rob Roy and The Heart of Midlothian) come in for their share of it. The evidence suggests, in short, that Maurice’s invention of the “period survey” was shaped by broader trends in early-nineteenth-century historiography, and especially by a kind of historiography that sought to compete with the historical novel in vividly recreating the social life of a vanished era. Some aspects of Maurice’s theory of culture—including his emphasis on the middle classes’ need for a history of their own—seem to have been drawn specifically from French historians of the 182s and s, who gave the bourgeoisie a role even more prominent than it had played in Scott. But Maurice’s more enduring innovation was simply his emphasis on the educational necessity of imagining the life of a particular era in intimate and vivid detail—at the expense of an older educational model that had emphasized continuity and progression. While this shift of emphasis is something Maurice could have picked up from Thierry or Guizot, he could just as easily have absorbed it from English essayists—for instance, from Thomas Macaulay’s well-known  review essay that defined “the perfect historian” as “he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature,” from “the crowds of the exchange and the coffee-house” to “the convivial table and the domestic hearth.” Of course, this essay is well-known among literary critics largely because Macaulay gives Scott credit for teaching

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historians how this should be done, and suggests that “a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated.”47 So in a sense it doesn’t greatly matter whether Maurice spent his time reading English or French historians. In the s and s, both sides of the Channel were celebrating a kind of history that sought to vividly reconstruct the everyday life of a single vanished era. This ideal of historical comprehension had been emerging (as Mark Salber Phillips has shown) for many decades, but it owed its celebrity in the s and s above all to the novels of Scott.48 Universities seem to have modeled their curricula on it a decade or so after its authority was established among writers of history. Another reason to believe that Maurice’s “period surveys” respond to recent historiographical trends can be found in the teaching of history itself. British professors of history seem to have shifted toward a periodized curriculum at almost exactly the same time as professors of English. At King’s College, this conjunction is hardly surprising, since Maurice united in himself the disciplines of English and Modern History. But  was also a transitional year at the local rival, University College, where Edward Creasy was hired to teach ancient and modern history just as Maurice was being hired at King’s. Creasy’s inaugural lecture proposed to reorganize the historical curriculum around period-centered courses, very much as Maurice was reorganizing the literary curriculum. Creasy explains that the historical lecturer has to dwell on a single period at length in order to depict all the social and intellectual dimensions of a vanished era. [H]e who sympathizes with his predecessors on the earth, and desires from their fate to foresee and fashion his own, will feel how vain it would be to attempt this without making himself thoroughly acquainted, not only with their names, their countries, but with the whole circumstances of the political and social state in which they moved and had their being. Now it is obvious that to develope this spirit in lecturing, so much only must be lectured on as can be fully and freely investigated.49

University College has not, like King’s College, preserved detailed records of courses and exams from the s and s, but we can get a glimpse of Creasy’s pedagogical practice from slightly later records. In , for instance, he offered a course on the reign of Henry the Third; in  he offered a course on Greek History, a course on Roman History, and a third course on the reign of Elizabeth. Creasy’s periodized courses contrast strikingly with the more

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sweeping plans laid out by his predecessors. Benjamin H. Malkin, hired to teach history in , had eschewed “details” and proposed instead to “make a judicious selection of those leading facts connected with the improvement of mankind, whether in periods more remote, or nearer to his own time.”50 Robert Vaughan, hired in , had proposed to cover “the whole space which precedes the age of Luther” in one course, embracing multiple nations, and including everything from “Mohammedan religion” to “Charles the Fifth.” The three centuries after Luther would provide material for a second course.51 Creasy’s courses on the reign of a single monarch represented a significant divergence from previous practice, and the divergence was self-conscious. “In a word,” Creasy declared, “I think it is better to treat a short subject thoroughly and exhaustively than a longer and more ambitious theme in a more cursory and superficial manner.”52 Similar transitions seem to have taken place in other institutions around the same time. In the early nineteenth century, modern history was not an examination subject at Oxford or Cambridge. It was covered in a cursory way by a Regius Professorship that was something of a sinecure; the Regius Professor of Modern History often gave a set of inaugural lectures and then, effectively, disappeared. But these inaugural lectures—for whatever they’re worth as evidence—do again suggest that the necessity of tightly periodized study began to be acknowledged in the s. The lectures up to and including Thomas Arnold’s in  each offer, in effect, a full survey of world history. But J. A. Cramer, in , proposes a set of four separate courses, each of which focuses narrowly on a single period of crisis, and in some cases on a single historical document. He insists that historical study needs to be “circumscribed within certain limits; lest, by attempting too much, we obtain only general and superficial results, and no clear and definite notion of any one period.”53 In short, the professors who taught modern history in the first four decades of the nineteenth century emphasized continuous progress, as professors of English did in the s—and like professors of English, they tried to cover the whole sweep of modern history in one or two terms. But around , or shortly thereafter, a shift took place in both disciplines, producing a curriculum that sacrificed continuity in order to dwell in more depth on periods of thirty or fifty years. At the end of the s and beginning of the s, a number of writers used a similar model of history to frame a new discourse of social criticism, which addressed contemporary problems by setting the present in a tautly

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contrastive relationship to a particular, often remote historical moment. A. W. N. Pugin’s Contrasts () dramatizes the contrastive strategy in a visual way: each pair of facing pages in the book contains on the left, a presentday building, and on the right, a building from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries with a parallel function. The contrast is intended to illustrate “the present decay of taste,” and the book indeed helped spark a revival of Gothic architecture.54 Thomas Carlyle attempted something loosely similar in Past and Present (), contrasting the present condition of England against the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in the twelfth century, and inviting the reader to glimpse in the medieval abbey a spirit of leadership and labor needful in the present. In asking twelfth- and eighteenth-century townsmen to trade places, and thereby discover the middle classes’ forgotten military valor, François Guizot made a similar critical gesture, which Maurice echoes in Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? But Maurice’s project runs in some ways perpendicular to these other examples. Instead of using a specific historical era to expound a solution to present-day problems, Maurice suggests that historical specificity itself is the solution, because specificity itself will awaken students to a sense of their membership in a community that transcends time. The facts of a particular history are those which awaken the historical feeling, are those which make a boy feel that he is connected with acts and events which passed hundreds of years ago, thousands of miles away. The spirit of a particular poem, is that which awakens the poetical spirit in answer to it, and makes him feel that the thoughts and feelings of men who lived hundreds of years ago, and thousands of miles away are his thoughts and feelings. If you would desire him ever to enter into the laws and principles of history, ever to understand the meaning and nature of poetry, you must first give him this living interest in both; this is the preparation, and, if he never goes further, he has something which will stay by him, something which has become part of his own being.55

It is worth noting that in this passage Maurice has little to say about nationality. Elsewhere in the same volume, he does suggest that the point of empathy with “men who lived hundreds of years ago” is specifically to give the middle classes a sense of national heritage. But here those men are also “thousands of miles away,” and the emphasis of the passage falls less on British nationality than on the general paradox that men can achieve a sense of transhistorical community by immersing themselves in historical

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particularity. There is not a contradiction here but a duality. The development of national consciousness was important to Maurice, but he also stresses that understanding oneself as a member of a nation matters above all as a way of coming to understand the broader fellowship of a human “family we declare to be universal, limited by no conditions of time or country,” which he identifies with an ecumenical Christian Church.56 To be sure, ecumenical Christianity is not the same thing as humanism, and it may be tempting to read the invocation of spiritual fellowship as boilerplate: a decorative swag of high-minded universalism draped across a fundamentally national project. But given the cast of Maurice’s mind, this would be a mistake. His model of historical cultivation has to be understood at once as a nationalist and as a more broadly spiritual project. To understand the religious dimension of Maurice’s invention, the period survey, we perhaps need to turn to the most notorious part of his career as a teacher. Maurice was let go from King’s College in  for teaching ideas “of a dangerous tendency, and calculated to unsettle the minds of the theological students of King’s College.”57 As well as teaching English literature and modern history, Maurice was by the end of the s a teacher of theology, and the Theological Essays he published in  interpreted Christian doctrines of immortal life and eternal punishment in a sense that outraged the evangelical wing of the Anglican church. Maurice believed that God’s love was the center of Christian theology, and like many nineteenth-century Christians, he had difficulty reconciling that idea with the expectation that God would commit most men and women to everlasting torment after death. His response to this dilemma hinged on rethinking the meaning of two phrases that appear in the New Testament: “eternal life” and “eternal death.” The Greek word translated here as “eternal” is aionios. Maurice concluded that it is a mistake to translate aionios as “everlasting” or “endless.” Something everlasting begins, and then goes on forever. Something eternal, on the other hand, is really outside of time. Maurice argued that the notion of everlasting future punishment mixes the idea of time and duration up with something that is really deeper than time: the eternal death implied by separation from the love of God. Separation from God is an inherent punishment that takes place in the eternal dimension of the present moment; it is not deferred to some future state. The corollary to that, of course, is that we don’t necessarily have to imagine a God who springs nasty surprises on Judgment Day. Conservative Anglicans concluded that this philosophy of time was a fancy

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way of sneaking in the heretical notion that all mankind would someday be redeemed, and they convinced the president of the college to remove Maurice from his post. Maurice’s theory of eternity was no doubt determined by a number of intersecting motivations, including the tender-mindedness about punishment that his evangelical critics had scented. But one also discerns a recurring pattern in his thought about time—a pattern that had already shaped his reflections on history and on the temporality of an individual life. In each of these domains, Maurice came to feel that it was important to distinguish true permanence—a timeless dimension that can connect apparently distant moments—from mere consecutive duration. There’s a passage in one of Maurice’s letters that perfectly illustrates the analogy. It describes a visit to the British Museum in May . “They” in the first sentence are his children, Freddy and Edmund. They both went to the British Museum this morning, and my mother, who has been reading Layard and longing to see the Nineveh wonders, joined us there. I think she has as much sympathy with the old world as any of us, perhaps more. But she reminded me of the last time we were in the museum together. We went with John and Susan and Annie, Carlyle and ——, so that the monuments of generations gone by bring one’s own history up surprisingly. The distance seems as great or as little in each case. Oh! it is surely true that there is no distance. The spiritual world is not under these time laws. If we were free from sin we should be under no check from them . . .58

In this passage, “sympathy with the old world” is analogous to immortal life; it offers a way of overcoming the laws of time and eternalizing experience. That promise of eternity is rendered palpable by déjà vu that maps a disorienting moment of personal nostalgia onto the historical alterity of “the Nineveh wonders.” Saying that “the distance seems as great or little in each case” evokes a temporality that cannot be measured by a timeline or by continuous narrative. Maurice’s reconstruction of literary pedagogy in the s strove for a similar kind of transcendence. Professors of the s had tried to communicate national culture through narratives of “progressive development” that, like the vulgar conception of heaven, had a determinate beginning and indefinite duration. Maurice asked students to discover a truer kind of permanence in a point-to-point relationship with a distant historical period. One could characterize this as an intimation of collective immortality,

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a way of glimpsing the permanence of human community in an apparently fleeting historical moment. Maurice was a theologian as well as a teacher of English, and it is perhaps not surprising that his innovations in literary-historical pedagogy should be connected to reflections on immortality. But I want to suggest that a broader pattern was at work here, one that extended beyond Maurice and indeed beyond the discipline of English studies. In the early s, many other writers were describing this sort of tightly periodized historical empathy as a mode of immortality. The metaphor was not novel; as previous chapters of this book have argued, poets had been associating historical difference with immortality since the middle of the eighteenth century, in an effort to define a mode of collective permanence that didn’t depend on the continuity of tradition. But it was unusual for historians to take this metaphor seriously, and I think it’s especially notable that they did so as they were abandoning continuous narrative in order to write (or teach) a more tightly periodized kind of history. Carlyle’s Past and Present, for instance, culminates in a famous scene of exhumation, as the Abbot Samson and twelve chosen brethren reverently remove St. Edmund’s body from its resting place and verify its miraculous incorruption. This drama of antiquarian hero-worship rather clearly parallels the reader’s relationship to Samson himself, and Richard Schoch has suggested that it may be “a meta-historiographical moment in which [Carlyle] reveals how history ought to be written. . . . The historian’s task, we are instructed, is to restore the past in its bodily integrity. . . .”59 The exhumation of a miraculously undecayed body is not quite the same thing as immortal life, of course, but it may be as close to permanence as one can come in a universe of stern Carlylean grotesquerie. Moreover, the chapter following the exhumation does hint at an abstract kind of resurrection by suggesting that the function of history is to strip away an “integument” of “Formulas become dead” in order to reveal the original living reality.60 This would appear to be Carlyle’s materialist version of Maurice’s effort to imagine the British Museum as a place truly outside of time. The fact that Carlyle had accompanied Maurice to the museum on the very visit he recalls so fondly is a coincidence, of course, although a pleasant one. Edward Creasy, who introduced period surveys to the historical curriculum at University College, was not given to abstract spirituality, like Maurice, or overt grotesquerie, like Carlyle. But Creasy resembled both men in suggesting

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that the historical sympathy evoked by periodization would lead ultimately to a negation of time. In the same inaugural lecture where he argues for the necessity of tightly periodized courses, he remarks “I believe that we should find the best clue to the successful employment of Imaginative energy lies in thinking, as much as possible in the Present tense, and not in the Past of every great historical crisis.” Like Maurice, Creasy implies that the ultimate moral purpose of history is to frame an enlarged, timeless conception of human community, producing “a common interest, a fellow-feeling in the thoughts, the words, the actions, and the fates of the human beings removed from us by the lapse of years.” And like Maurice, he hints that this exercise of historical sympathy will negate time and death, “raising up the spirits of former times.” “Unless you can thus feel and think, unless you can thus bid the cold chronicles become ‘Thoughts that breathe and words that burn,’ and call up before the eye and heart, the men and manners of former times, the study is flat and unprofitable. . . .”61 In different ways, Creasy, Carlyle, and Maurice were all advancing a model of historical time where the present is bound to the past, not by continuous tradition or progress, but by an exercise of historical imagination that leaps over differences of place, time, and culture to establish a human community whose timeless scope is dramatized by the very differences it negates. Previous chapters of this book have traced a paradoxical connection between historical change and immortality in writers from Walter Scott to Felicia Hemans. Drawing partly on Emile Durkheim, I have argued that these visions of immortality were at bottom fantasies about the permanence of collective life, expressing a longing for a kind of permanence that might somehow be founded on the very changes that seemed to make earthly community ephemeral. At times, my argument up to this point has leaned on the Durkheimian presupposition that immortality is, almost by definition, a collective state. But by the beginning of the s, this presupposition is no longer necessary, because the latent content of poetic fantasy has become entirely explicit in historical prose. Writers like Maurice, Creasy, and Carlyle describe historical imagination, more or less literally, as a resurrection of the dead. The figure has become so familiar to us now that it conveys little more than vague antiquarian piety, or perhaps even—as I’ll suggest in the final chapter—nostalgia for a defunct model of culture. But around  the metaphor still had a polemical edge: it celebrated a tightly periodized mode of historical empathy, and championed it against older modes of historical

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writing, and teaching, that had sought to trace continuities and demonstrate progression. In texts from this period, the metaphor of immortality is bound up specifically with a new mode of historical cultivation founded on discontinuity. In the careers of Maurice and Creasy, the metaphor of immortality was also linked, intriguingly, to the emergence of a curricular structure that remains dominant today—the period survey. It’s not clear, however, that this connection should license us in drawing many conclusions about the cultural significance of contemporary curricula. Higher education operates at a different scale in the twenty-first-century than it did in the nineteenth, and with a different social mandate. Institutions and academic disciplines now feel that their legitimacy depends on the production of specialized research at least as much as it does on general education. And in literature departments, at least, the periodized curriculum has become deeply interwoven with a research-generating system that governs professional communication and graduate education, as well as hiring and promotion. This system of incentives would probably continue to sustain a periodized curriculum even if professors lost all faith in the theories of cultivation that originally governed its emergence. It seems likely, in fact, that a transition of that kind has already taken place. In the period from  to , however, there was little pressure for scholars to specialize in a single period, and English departments (where they even existed) were rarely staffed by more than one or two people. So the success of the period survey in these decades cannot easily be explained as a consequence of professional specialization. Where period surveys flourished, they flourished because professors felt this was the best way for students to absorb literary history. And they did flourish. First, around , they swept the London universities. I have focused on literary examples from King’s College, and historical examples from University College, but the transformation of the curriculum affected both disciplines at both institutions. At King’s College, Maurice taught modern history as well as English, and his historical courses became as tightly periodized as his literary ones. At University College, R. G. Latham was hired to teach English in , and like his colleague Creasy in history, he seems to have proposed periodized courses on (for instance) “The Dramatists of the Elizabethan Age” and “English Poetry under the Stuarts.”62 There were moments of reversion to an older plan: in –, after Maurice left King’s College, his immediate successor, George Webbe Dasent, taught a

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course on “The Rise and Development of the English Language and Literature After the Norman Conquest,” which sounds like a course from the s. But the very next year, Dasent was replaced by John Sherman Brewer, who had been a lecturer under Maurice, and taught tightly periodized courses very much on the plan Maurice had introduced.63 The discipline of Modern History was taken over at the same time by Charles H. Pearson, who had been one of Maurice’s students. Pearson wrote a long letter to the Principal of the College explicitly defending the emphasis on periodization in the curriculum he and Brewer had collectively designed.64 The picture at University College is more complex, because their department experienced considerably more turnover. A period-centered approach seems to have waxed and waned at times in the s and s. But Henry Morley, who held the English chair from  to  and left a deep impression on literary study in Britain, came down on the side of a clearly periodized curriculum. Morley’s exams suggest that he sought above all to produce students who could recognize a period style, and distinguish writers of different eras on that basis.65 Morley, incidentally, had studied at King’s College, and had begun his teaching career at King’s College at the end of the s, serving as a lecturer under Maurice’s old lecturer Brewer. There is, in short, fairly strong evidence that Maurice’s innovation was a decisive moment in the institutional history of literary study; it shaped a curricular model that endured at King’s College and eventually came to dominate University College as well. When Oxford and Cambridge formed their English schools later in the century, they too adopted a periodized curriculum. Period style continued to play a central role in literary pedagogy from the second half of the nineteenth century through much of the twentieth. In the concept of period style, late-nineteenth-century aestheticism merges with romantic historicism, which had used literature’s evocative power to immortalize vanished social systems. Subjective and social approaches to art unite in the deeply appealing conceit that individual aesthetic cultivation dramatizes the timeless dimension of history. Because of this synergy between an aestheticism that emphasizes style, and a mode of historicism that emphasizes the evocation of specific vanished moments, the practice of periodization has exerted a more pervasive, systematic, and enduring influence on literary studies than on the discipline of history itself. I have noted that professors of history at London universities shifted, around , from long surveys emphasizing world-historical progress to shorter courses

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that sought to evoke a specific era. But since historians were striving to cover multiple national traditions, their period designations still remained looser than those in English. In , for instance, Edward Creasy covered “English History, from the Time of Alfred to the Elizabethan Age.” His colleagues in English would have broken this rubric down into smaller (dynasty-sized) courses designed to evoke a unitary cultural moment. Moreover, historians’ period-centered courses often had to compete with courses organized around causal problems. In the same year, Creasy offered a course on “The History of Slavery, Ancient and Modern, Oriental, European, African, and American:— on the Causes of Slavery, and on its Effects on Slaves, on Slaveholders, and on non-Slaveholding Freemen.”66 The evocation of period mattered to Creasy, but so did comparative social analysis, and questions of causality. Throughout the twentieth century, historians likewise remained willing to subordinate periodization, when necessary, to the ad-hoc boundaries of a causal problem. In English departments, by contrast, the evocation of period became an overriding disciplinary mission, and produced a periodizing scheme that has remained remarkably unaltered by other revolutions in the profession. By the s, departments of English at American universities had already begun to offer courses in a standard set of periods that would remain extremely familiar to twenty-first-century professors: “English Romanticism,” “Elizabethan Drama,” and “Eighteenth-Century Literature,” just to give a few examples of courses from Yale and Columbia in the first half of the s.67 In the course of the subsequent century, schools of critical theory came and went, while the overall scale and structure of periodization remained largely unchanged. Our narratives about literary studies emphasize critical theory, since at first glance that appears to be where the drama and conflict of the profession are located. But backing up to take the long view of institutional history, one could argue that the drama and conflict have been operating, all the while, in the service of a periodizing imperative that has remained unchallenged since its emergence in the nineteenth century because it is perceived as indispensable to the discipline’s cultural mission.

4

The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization, and a Forgotten Challenge to It (1886 –1949)

T

h e e n g l i s h l i t e r a r y cu r r i culum changed remarkably slowly in the twentieth century. One can page through catalogs from  and find courses that bear exactly the same titles today: “English Romanticism,” “Elizabethan Drama.” To be sure, departments of English now teach more American and postcolonial literature than they did in the early twentieth century. But the organizing grid of period and nationality itself has remained (at least until quite recently) undisturbed by the addition of new content. Even more surprisingly, it has been undisturbed by a series of epochal struggles over the very definition of the discipline. Philology gave way to literary history, which gave way to New Criticism, and to poststructuralism—but none of those transitions seriously challenged the curricular primacy of the period survey course. My goal in this chapter is to explain the curious stability of that institution. In a fractious discipline that repeatedly redefined the purpose of literary instruction, and especially the relationship between literature and history, how could the organizing function of “literary periods” have gone unchallenged? If it actually had gone unchallenged, this would be a difficult question to answer. But the primacy of the period has always been challenged by alternative curricular models. In fact, the history of literary studies has been if anything more turbulent and surprising than standard histories suggest: course catalogs from the early twentieth century make absolutely startling reading, full 114

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of ambitious courses on the history of journalism, and strange disciplinary projects like “General Literatology” that are now entirely forgotten. The periodized curriculum has been curiously stable, not because no one thought to challenge it—but because institutional challenges have never displaced periodization in a significant, enduring way. In the first half of the twentieth century, comparative philology, comparative literature, and the history of ideas each threatened to shift the focus of debate from discrete “periods” and “movements” to processes of development. In the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed for a while that theories of genre (guided by archetypal or structuralist premises) might become more important than chronology. Each of these movements made significant inroads in the curriculum, and then retreated, leaving the organizing grid of period and nationality unshaken. This pattern suggests that periodization has fulfilled some important but poorly articulated social function. Periodization has been no one’s conscious ideal: when periods become a subject of explicit debate, their limitations are always acknowledged. Alternative curricular plans have frequently been proposed. But somehow, the alternatives never take root in a way that makes them seem educationally indispensable. And somehow it always does remain indispensable to offer courses on “romanticism” or “modernism.” The opacity of this phenomenon suggests that it rests on a social foundation not fully articulated as conscious belief. This chapter will examine one alternative curricular model, and ask why it failed, in order to cast light on the social forces that have made periodization such a resilient institution. In the process, I hope to illuminate some interesting and poorly-understood passages of disciplinary history. I’ll focus on a loosely-defined initiative that flourished in early twentieth-century America (–), under the names “literary theory,” “general literature,” or “comparative literature.” At least two of these phrases are familiar, but few people realize that they have an institutional history running back to the dawn of the twentieth century. In , for instance, Richard Moulton’s title at the University of Chicago was “Professor of Literary Theory and Interpretation”; he headed a department of “General Literature” that announced “the Theory of Literature” and “Comparative Literature” as its central subjects.1 In certain ways contemporary scholars have more in common with Moulton’s historicist goals than we do with the better-known New Critical figures of mid-century. So it may be time for us to revisit the early-twentieth-century discipline, and ask what “literary theory” meant before it was overrun by critics.

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The Theoretical Ambitions of Comparative Literature The history of “comparative literature” is widely misunderstood. Even if scholars are aware that it existed in the late ninteenth century, they generally prefer to trace their genealogy back to well-known, charismatic figures like René Wellek or Eric Auerbach. In a recent book about the discipline, for instance, Gayatri Spivak says confidently that “Comparative Literature was a result of European intellectuals fleeing ‘totalitarian’ regimes.”2 Taken literally, this is simply not true. There were already American departments of comparative literature in the first decade of the twentieth century—for instance at Harvard, at Columbia, and at the University of Chicago. These departments were not founded by refugees from totalitarianism, or by European emigrés at all. On the other hand, Spivak’s statement is not quite as false as it appears, because the persistence of the phrase “comparative literature” does paper over a significant conceptual shift. At the beginning of the the twentieth century, “comparative” was not yet a synonym for “international”: scholars often published works of “comparative literature” that discussed a single national tradition. The second volume of Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, for instance, was Chivalry in English Literature: Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare ().3 Moreover, departments of English—for instance at the University of California—could offer “Seminars in the Comparative Study of Literature” that were occasionally restricted to the works of a single author.4 In the first three decades of the twentieth century, “comparative literature” was defined by its theoretical ambitions—especially by its aspiration to explain (rather than merely describe) processes of literary change. The international scope we associate with “comp lit” was initially a consequence of this (literally “comparative”) mission; it wasn’t yet the fundamental definition of the discipline. The broadly theoretical character of the comparative project allowed it to challenge periodization in two senses. First, obviously, comparative literature could undermine the national context that is taken for granted when we talk about “Elizabethan” or “Victorian” literature. But because comparatists sought to explain continuous processes of development, they also, more interestingly, challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all. This chapter will focus on scholarly and pedagogical developments between  and . In , H. M. Posnett’s book Comparative Literature

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coined the title phrase and called for new courses of study to be established at leading universities. By the first decade of the twentieth century, many such departments had been created. But by the s, the growth curve had turned negative: few new departments of “comparative literature” were being born, and several free-standing departments either disappeared (as at the University of Chicago) or were absorbed into “English and Comparative Literature” (as at Columbia). The fortunes of the discipline revived after the Second World War, but by that point comparative literature had grown closer to other forms of literary study—in particular, by accepting periodization as a fundamental organizing principle. So for my purposes the forgotten period between  and  is most interesting. In this era, comparative literature was an ambitious, quasi-anthropological project that sought to frame a general theory of literary development. Why didn’t a project of that kind leave more enduring traces in the curriculum? How did it come to seem, self-evidently, a dead end? Why is it now not even remembered by many leading comparatists? H. M. Posnett’s Comparative Literature is an early and impressive example of scholarship in this tradition. It appeared in an “International Scientific Series” published by Kegan Paul, and openly proposed to apply “historical science to Literature.” For Posnett, this meant above all that the concept of literature should be subjected to a thoroughgoing historical relativism. The critic must recognize, not only that standards of literary merit vary from age to age, but that there is no single, stable definition of “literature” itself. “The separation of imagination from experience, of didactic purpose from aesthetic pleasure” that might have seemed to define literature in the nineteenth century are recent inventions, limited to societies that have undergone “the economic development known as ‘division of labor.’” The epic, dramatic, and lyric modes cannot be viewed as universal categories. “[C]ountries widely removed from European culture possess such forms as no European language can correctly express, because among no European people have they been developed.”5 Posnett does give the literatures of China and India sustained attention, but he also proceeds to offer a general theory of literary history that will strike contemporary readers as an example of the very universalism he warns against. Roughly, Posnett traces a steady expansion of the social group (from the clan, to the city commonwealth, to the nation and/or religious community with universalizing aspirations). Each of these social forms produces its own characteristic mode of expression, implying different kinds

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of human personality and different relationships to physical nature. The city commonweath, for instance, “allows dramatic analysis of character its fullest scope.”6 This developmental scheme is influenced by Herbert Spencer and has a teleological bent. In spite of his professed relativism, Posnett tacitly implies that European “national literature” is the most advanced form of expression. In short, Comparative Literature has its limits and constitutive contradictions. But they are quite different from the limits of late-twentiethcentury comparative literature. The most obvious contrast between the two projects is simply the scope of the earlier one. By the s, comparatists were typically concerned to trace parallels between several modern national literatures. Comparative literature was in effect an international version of the same historical/critical project that scholars were pursuing within national literature departments. Posnett’s goal had been quite different: it was to explain the transformation of the concept of literature itself, from pre-literate folklore to the present. Working on this scale, there could be no question of “periodization” in the usual sense: Comparative Literature includes no chapters on romanticism or on Elizabethan drama. The book does identify broad stages of development—the clan, the city commonwealth—but these are explanatory categories organized by substantive social principles, rather than periods organized by chronology. The same thing held true in the works of Posnett’s successors. In his  attempt to produce a textbook of comparative literature, for instance, Alastair Mackenzie distinguished “primitive,” “barbaric,” “autocratic,” and “democratic” phases of literary development.7 One could say that this made “comparative literature” more akin to a social science than to literary criticism. Mackenzie, for instance, refers to “that branch of anthropology which is commonly known as literature,” and traces continuities between literature, folklore, and myth.8 But it would be equally fair to characterize the comparative project as an early attempt to move literature departments in the direction of “theory,” and at the beginning of the twentieth century, “literary theory” was in fact almost a synonym for “comparative literature.” The connection may be surprising, since we have recently tended to oppose “theory” and “history” as alternate paths for literary study, and the works of these early comparatists were nothing if not historical. But in the early twentieth century, the historical part of literary study seemed to be precisely the part of the discipline suited to theoretical generalization. Charles Darwin had recently elevated biology from a descriptive science to a

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science of change; anthropologists like James Frazer had likewise moved from collections of folklore toward laws of social change. It seemed logical that literary scholarship would advance from descriptive literary history toward a theory of The Evolution of Literature, to borrow the title of Mackenzie’s  textbook. Mackenzie represents the comparative project at its most scientific: he not only proposes “provisional laws” of “literary evolution” but tries to rename literary study “literatology,” on the model of “anthropology.” Few other writers were willing to go quite that far. But the broader goal of developing literary history into a theory of cultural change was widespread in turn-ofthe-century scholarship, and many of the period’s well-known intellectuals moonlighted as scholars of “comparative literature” when they were pursuing it. Compared to quasi-anthropologists like Posnett and Mackenzie, George Santayana’s relation to literature was relatively belletristic. He approached poetry as a vehicle for philosophy (his own home discipline), not as a reflection of social structure. But Santayana’s lectures on literary history were published as Volume  of Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, and they do share the comparatists’ interest in tracing large patterns of cultural development: “Lucretius, Dante and Goethe,” for instance, “sum up the chief phases of European philosophy,—naturalism, supernaturalism, and romanticism.”9 Irving Babbitt, to take another example, hardly aspired to be a social scientist. Books like Literature and the American College () represented, on the contrary, a reaction against the specialization and professionalization of literary study. But in The New Laokoon (), Babbitt presents himself as a scholar of comparative literature, in order to articulate a sweeping theory of cultural change. Perhaps most tellingly, Babbitt contrasts his model of “comparative literature” to a more popular version of the discipline: Many people are inclined to see in the popularity of this new subject a mere university fad. They will not be far wrong unless it can become something more than an endless study of sources and influences and minute relationships. Neo-classicism and romanticism are both world-movements. It should be the ambition of the student of comparative literature to make all attempts to define these movements in terms of one literature seem one-sided and ill-informed.10

Babbitt’s advice for students of comparative literature will probably seem self-evident to contemporary readers. Of course, the task of the comparatist

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is to frame an international definition of movements like “classicism” and “romanticism.” But we should attend to Babbitt’s hectoring tone, which suggests that defining periods and movements (as opposed to broad structuring principles of cultural history) was not yet a primary concern for comparatists. Instead, as Babbitt’s account suggests, the “university fad” of comparative literature was commonly expressed through influence-hunting and sourcestudy. A synoptic account of literary development from preliterate times to the present may have been the discipline’s ultimate goal, but in practice most scholars contributed to it by patiently accumulating evidence of particular causal connections. I’m stressing the “causal” character of these connections because early-twentieth-century literary scholars proudly emphasized it themselves. Between  and , for instance,  article titles in PMLA mentioned “source(s)” or “influence(s).” (By contrast, in the same span of time between  and , only three titles in PMLA mentioned either term.) To be sure, only a fraction of this influence-hunting was carried out by scholars with a formal appointment in comparative literature. But Babbitt was not alone in seeing the quest for “sources and influences and minute relationships” as a symptom of the comparative “fad.” It would be equally true to flip the statement around and say that early-twentieth-century enthusiasm for “comparative literature” was itself a symptom of a broader impulse to make literary study a discipline with an explanatory rather than merely descriptive mission. This is what scholars meant when they called for literary study to become “scientific,” and tracing connections in literary history seemed to be a way to achieve that sort of explanatory force. Comparatists were not alone in this belief, but they understood their discipline as peculiarly dedicated to the study of continuity—whether across national, linguistic, or temporal boundaries. Other scholars might trace influences, but influence and continuity were the whole substance of the comparative project. In , the catalog copy for Chicago’s department of “General Literature” put this rather beautifully: The Department of General Literature has for its purpose the study of literature as an organic whole. Literary influences transcend the limits of language and of nationality, and persist through the centuries. The thought and purpose of one writer may find rebirth in another of different speech and of a different age. Particular literary motives pass on from land to land, gathering a vigorous individual life. Literary types crystallize and reappear, fortified or limited by reminiscence.11

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“Reminiscence” and “rebirth” suggest that literature’s transcendence of national and temporal boundaries may constitute a kind of immortality. Appropriately enough, the theme of immortality is fortified by a faint echo of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (“I pass like night from land to land / I have strange power of speech.”)

The Curricular Limits of the Comparative Project I have already hinted that early-twentieth-century comparatism failed to become immortal in at least one sense: its central concern with continuity— with the tracing of sources and influences—is no longer shared by many scholars. What happened to that project? It would be tempting to approach the question intellectually, by examing critiques of influence and continuity in late-twentieth-century scholarship. But that sort of intellectual contrast would be almost certain to reaffirm our own assumptions, since it allows us to rehearse established rationales for doing what we currently do. Moreover, a strictly intellectual approach would neglect the significance of the broader institutional pattern I sketched in the introduction to this chapter: the persistence of the period survey course over more than a century and a half, in spite of a long and varied series of challenges. Early-twentiethcentury comparatists’ emphasis on “continuity” was one of those unsuccessful challenges to periodization, and its similarity to other short-lived projects suggests that we may not have to search too far to understand why the tracing of sources and influences is no longer central to literary study. Scholarly projects can survive, and even flourish, in the face of devastating intellectual critique. But projects that aren’t institutionalized as courses will sooner or later disappear, because they have to be sustained by unremunerated labor. So the first question we should ask is this: How successful were early-twentiethcentury comparatists at giving their project a curricular embodiment? In one sense they were very successful: at many institutions, they managed to create their own departments. This is more than can be said, for instance, of philology. Even when philology was at the peak of its late-nineteenthcentury prestige, studies of language and literature tended to fuse in a single department. Because comparatists often worked across linguistic boundaries, they had no obvious disciplinary home, and could plausibly demand their own department. (Philology was similarly able to break away at institutions— like Harvard—where it embraced the rubric of “comparative philology.”)

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The first flush of programs in “General Literature” or “Comparative Literature” emerged in the period between  and . Generally, institutions that didn’t develop a program of “comparative literature” by  ended up waiting until after the Second World War to do so. Departments of comparative literature got their start in a range of different ways. Harvard was one of the first schools to embrace the new discipline, and it did so explicitly by hiring Arthur Richmond Marsh as an “Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature” in .12 Harvard also immediately created a new rubric for “comparative literature” in the catalog. The State University of Kentucky does not seem to have gone looking for a comparatist, but they got one when they hired Alastair Mackenzie in . By  he had changed the name of the English department to “English and Comparative Literature.”13 At the University of Chicago, the department of General Literature has a more complicated history, fueled in practice by a demand for literature courses in translation. Biblical literature made this demand apparent in the nineteenth century, since relatively few students knew Hebrew and Greek. By , courses on the Bible in English were rolled into a department of “Literature (in English)” that also taught other literatures in translation. In , this became a department of “General Literature” that openly embraced “literary theory” and “comparative literature” as central parts of its mission.14 These varied paths are worth tracing because they illustrate a strategically vague fusion of impulses that was central to the curricular success of the comparative project. The encompassing anthropological theories produced by writers like Posnett and Mackenzie may have defined the ultimate goals of the field. But at most institutions, those synoptic theories played only a small role in the curriculum. (At the University of Kentucky, Mackenzie taught a required senior capstone course on the “Evolution of Literature,” based on his book of the same name, but this is an exceptional case.)15 Instead, course offerings were shaped by a demand for literature in translation, and by the existing interests of faculty who worked on more than one linguistic tradition. In short, Posnett’s ambitiously global anthropological project began to turn into a more familiar kind of “comp lit” as soon as it had to be institutionalized in the curriculum. Courses were rarely organized around broad social categories like “the clan” or “the city commonwealth.” Instead they echoed the structure of existing courses on European national

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literature—with the slight twist that a single course could now cover more than one national tradition. Both at Chicago and at Harvard, for instance, courses were regularly offered on romanticism as a European phenomenon. Comparative literature failed to dislodge the period survey course, then, in part for simple reasons of path dependency. The literary curriculum was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure. But the cost of doing that was a fundamental reorientation of its approach to literary history. So this is partly a story about institutional inertia. But inertia and path dependency are not the whole story. For although the comparative project was reshaped by its collision with curricular institutions, those institutions were themselves capable of change—and by the s they were already beginning to change to accommodate the comparative emphasis on continuity and development. Many departments of national literature began to offer courses on international themes—“English Influences Upon German Literature,” for instance.16 More interestingly, course descriptions in many departments began to promise to explain processes of development instead of merely describing a period. At the University of Illinois in –, for instance, courses included “The Transition from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century,” “The Development of the Essay,” and “The Origin of the English Novel.”17 At Radcliffe College in –, they included “The Development of French Comedy in the Nineteenth Century” and “The Development of French Lyric Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.”18 At Stanford in –, they included “The Historical Spirit in English Literature: Its Growth from  to the Present Day.”19 The widely-shared impulse to reframe courses around developmental questions suggests that the project of comparative literature was just one symptom of a broader will-to-theory among literary historians. In the later nineteenth century, the academic study of literature had been dominated by a conflict between literary critics (who were often genteel amateurs without formal training) and philologists with doctoral degrees. As Michael Warner has pointed out, the modern discipline of literary study was produced in large part by sublating that dialectical opposition. Professors caught between genteel and professionalized alternatives began to look for a version of literary study that would promise both general cultivation and specialized methodology.20

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This demand to fuse cultivation with theory would eventually be addressed by the New Critical claim that reading was itself a specialized skill requiring formal training. But in the first three decades of the twentieth century, many scholars found it more intuitive to fuse cultural and methodological sophistication by proposing a “scientific,” explanatory model of literary history. One way to express this emphasis in the curriculum was to reorient courses around transitions that could pose historical puzzles. “The Transition from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century” is a chronologically delimited rubric, and in that sense not absolutely different from “Augustan Literature.” But one of these titles implies an object to be described; the other implies a process of change to be explained. In the teens and twenties, course descriptions in literature departments across America shifted subtly but palpably in the latter direction. In this shift, periodization is not erased (there is still a “seventeenth century” and an “eighteenth century.”) But it is slightly decentered. Literary Culture and the Rejection of Continuity The problem-centered course descriptions that literature professors began to write in the nineteen-teens closely resembled a genre of course description that already dominated departments of History, and that remains prominent there. “History of Modern Colonization.” “The Development of the French Monarchy, –.”21 History courses are still commonly framed around explanatory puzzles, and especially around processes of development or moments of transition. In literature departments, by contrast, the rhetoric of transition and development didn’t last long. It had largely disappeared by the s, and it hasn’t returned on a large scale since then. We may not have abandoned historical explanation, but the rubrics in our course catalogs tend to downplay that goal in favor of description. When they mention history, they typically name a period like “English Romanticism” or a movement like “the Harlem Renaissance.” What happened to course rubrics that promise to explain processes of development? The short answer is that they were swept away by a larger war—well described in Gerald Graff ’s Professing Literature—between “scholars” and “critics.”22 I have already suggested that the explanatory aspirations of earlytwentieth-century literary history should be understood as an attempt to reconcile specialized learning with general literary culture. But many observers felt that the literary-historical solution had in practice abandoned

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cultural ideals. Instead of evaluating works or exercising literary sensibility, historical scholars spent their energy discovering sources and tracing influences. Even John Livingstone Lowes—author of The Road to Xanadu (), itself a monument to source-study—worried that “our interests are becoming special, minute, discrete.”23 Other observers were more sweeping in their condemnation of literary history, and they tended to indict exactly the two aspects of the period’s historicism I have highlighted in this chapter: scholars’ aspiration to explain processes of development scientifically, and the notion that comparative literature could unite those processes in a connected, continuous whole. Norman Foerster’s book The American Scholar () offered a critique that would be cited often in subsequent decades: Literary history, in the strict view of it now prevailing, is an effort to ascertain and describe the sequence of literary phenomena objectively, scientifically, without the bias of criticism. Its ultimate purpose is to present the history of literature as a whole, regardless of linguistic and national boundaries. Hence, in theory, all the departments of literature in our universities coalesce in the department of comparative literature. Subordinate to this final purpose is the study of each national literature. . . . Subordinate in turn is the history of movements and periods. . . . Thus, if literary history were ever completely and finally written, we should be able to assign to every work a place of its own in an unbroken sequence. . . . Owing to gaps in the record . . . this comprehensive aim can never be fulfilled, but to it the literary historian addresses himself in the hopeful spirit of the natural scientist.

For Foerster this is a mistakenly scientistic model of literary history. It represents “literature as a developing organism,” and concerns itself merely “with heredity, with environment, with evolution.” In tracing the relations of part and whole, what get lost are questions of “worth or value . . . praise or blame.” This prevents literary scholarship from fulfilling its social responsibility—which, Foerster suggests, is to justify the pre-eminence of an elite on general cultural grounds, rather than mere knowledge. “Soon we shall have to reach a decision whether the Ph.D stamps a person as belonging to the élite, or merely hallmarks him as a Robot of Learning.” The words belonged to Otto Heller, Dean of Washington University, but Foerster borrowed them as the first sentence of his “Preface,” and they fairly reflect his argument that literature should be studied for “its civilizing properties,” and not merely as an object of knowledge.24

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What Foerster doesn’t offer is a fully-thought-out alternate model of literary scholarship. He suggests that literary history, for instance, needs to be reconnected to critical judgment. But since Foerster assumes that critical judgment is founded on eternal standards (“excellences that are largely timeless and aesthetic”), he is unable to explain how judgment and historical specificity can be mutually supportive principles.25 For a more satisfactory solution to that problem, we should turn to René Wellek. In explaining how literary history and critical judgment could fuse, Wellek also decisively reaffirmed the centrality of periodization in literary studies, even for projects like comparative literature that had previously resisted it. Wellek will thus provide the single clearest answer to the question that has guided this chapter from the beginning: Why didn’t comparative literature successfully displace periodization in the first half of the twentieth century? For Wellek’s ideas about periodization, the most obvious place to turn is his famous debate with A. O. Lovejoy about the nature of romanticism. Lovejoy was a philosopher rather than a literary scholar, but his essay on romanticism was published in PMLA, and his version of “the history of ideas” envisioned the historian’s task in a way that was quite compatible with early-twentieth-century comparative literature. Lovejoy proposed to trace processes of development by dissolving national traditions and competing schools of thought into their constituent components—“unit ideas” that might separate and recombine with each other over time. This conception of history was analogous both to recently-popularized genetic models of heredity, and to literary historians’ preoccupation with the transmission of influences and motifs. In “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (), Lovejoy puts the technique into practice by dissolving “Romanticism” into a collection of “ideas and aesthetic susceptibilities.” In doing so, he finds that the traits characterized as romantic have no essential connection with each other, and are in fact frequently contradictory. Romanticism is said to look back nostalgically to the past, but also to ignore the past in favor of the future; it is said to worship physical nature, but also to look through the physical world as through a veil. Lovejoy concludes that we should refer to “romanticisms” in the plural, but he also, more importantly, concludes that no cultural movement is a unified entity. What matter are the “simpler, diversely combinable, intellectual and emotional components of such complexes,” and it is the task of the historian to trace those components as they combine and recombine.26

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Wellek responded to Lovejoy by reaffirming the unity of European romanticism, first in an essay of  and again at more length in . But since Wellek’s first response came sixteen years after Lovejoy’s essay, “respond” is perhaps the wrong verb. The so-called Lovejoy-Wellek debate is not a controversy that can be dated to a particular moment. It is better understood as dramatizing a contrast between two successive approaches to literary history. Lovejoy’s attempt to explain cultural change in a detailed, continuous way by breaking movements into their components had harmonized with the goals of literary scholarship around . But by the s, criticism was in the ascendant, and the place of history in literary study was becoming increasingly uncertain. By challenging Lovejoy, Wellek made a statement not just about romanticism but about the historical aspirations that critics ought to retain, and those they ought to discard. I agree with Robert Griffin that the key to Wellek’s argument is his insistence on critical evaluation.27 Wellek acknowledges that many writers now called “romantic” would not have embraced the slogan themselves, and acknowledges that the romantic period included unromantic elements, which vary from one nation to the next. He nevertheless defines romanticism generally as a movement having “imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style.”28 Wellek is able to say both of these things—extracting unity from apparent diversity— because he understands periods as evaluative categories. A period is “a system of norms,” and we know which norms were operative in a given period by asking how successfully they guided practice. “[I]t is entirely possible to envisage a situation in which older norms still prevailed numerically while the new conventions were created or used by writers of greatest artistic importance. It thus seems to me impossible to avoid the critical problem of evaluation in literary history.”29 By , this insistence on evaluation was not controversial. For several decades, writers like Foerster had been calling for a return to an evaluative, critical history. So Wellek runs no risk by foregrounding evaluative assumptions on the second page of his article. The fact that he presumed a role for critical judgment would be, on the contrary, a strength of his argument for many readers. In fact, one might even say that this is the real force of Wellek’s intervention: less to prove, empirically, that literary periods exist, than to show that periodization is a necessary assumption because it alone provides an organizing context where evaluation and history can work together.

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This would be a fairly bold reading if all we had to work with were Wellek’s essays about romanticism. But in the s, as Wellek was developing his response to Lovejoy, he was also developing a general theory of literary history. His thoughts on the topic appeared first in Literary Scholarship, its Aims and Methods (), edited by Norman Foerster; a more polished version of the same argument was later included in the Theory of Literature () Wellek wrote with Austin Warren. Both versions of this argument have attracted some comment. Gerald Graff suggests that the  version of the essay inaugurated an influential (and he contends, mistaken) distinction between “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” literary history—between histories of literature organized by philosophical concepts or social forces, and those organized by properly literary categories. 30 Mark Parker has observed that the  version of the argument poses a strange contradiction that keeps recurring in subsequent discussions of periodization. Wellek seems to acknowledge that the concept of a literary period is inherently unstable, at the same time as he posits the concept as absolutely necessary for literary history.31 I think these are both insightful observations; the point I want to make is that they’re logically connected. It is true that there is something strangely imperative about Wellek’s approach to periodization. But he insists on period concepts (in spite of their acknowledged intellectual problems) because characterizing periods turns out to be the only way to write an “intrinsic” literary history. Wellek arrives at this conclusion because he’s candid about the difficulties confronting a historian who wishes to stick to a purely literary subject. The  version of his argument begins, in fact, by asking whether it is even “possible to write literary history, that is, to write that which will be both literary and a history.” Attempts to produce real narrative connection tend to become either “social histories, or histories of thought illustrated in literature.” On the other hand, histories that are resolutely literary in their approach tend to cease to be historical, dissolving into “a discontinuous series of essays on individual authors.”32 Although the text doesn’t frame the problem in these terms, Wellek is grappling here with evidence for social materialism. Ideas do make a difference in history, and literary forms make a difference as well. But when historians strive to link events and explain changes, the overall shape of a convincing account will usually turn out to be social rather than intellectual, because history is at bottom a social process. However, this is definitely not the conclusion Wellek himself reaches. Instead he suggests that “historical

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and natural processes” require fundamentally different kinds of explanation. Natural processes are governed by regular laws. But since it is impossible to identify regular laws that govern history, historical processes will dissolve into a meaningless sequence of events unless we relate “the historical process to a value or norm.” On the other hand, “the individuality of the historical event” requires us to acknowledge that there can be multiple norms at play in history: “the historical process will produce ever new forms of value, hitherto unknown and unpredictable.” In short, literary history can only be given meaning if it is organized around a series of periods or epochs, each of which represents a new and incommensurable system of values.33 These ideas are not new; in fact, much of the earlier portion of this book has traced their genealogy. But Wellek is drawn to them for different reasons than motivated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. I am afraid I tend not to give much weight to his explicit philosophy of history; Wellek is a thoughtful literary critic, but when he dips into philosophy, abstract premises seem to be invented in an ad hoc way to support predetermined conclusions. (Why, for instance, do historical processes have to be understood in relation to systems of values?) But there are other moments where Wellek seems quite candid about the motives governing this argument. There is, one must admit, a logical circle here: the historical process has to be judged by values, while the scale of values is itself derived from history. But this seems unavoidable, for otherwise we must either resign ourselves to the idea of a meaningless flux of change or apply some extra-literary standard— some Absolute, extraneous to the process of literature.34

The clause after “otherwise” admits, in effect, that periodization is necessary for disciplinary reasons. It is taken as a given that we cannot afford to organize literary history around social categories “extraneous” to literature. So we have to frame period concepts around scales of value that can be drawn from literature itself. The task of the literary historian will be less to explain change causally than to contrast those historically contingent scales of value. But the important thing for my purposes is the unchallenged premise behind this argument: the study of literature must have intellectual autonomy from other disciplines. I think that premise is very dubious, and should make us skeptical about Wellek’s defense of periodization. But I also want to acknowledge that Wellek was grappling with a real disciplinary problem. Because the course of history

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is not often shaped by purely literary forces, literary historians will always find it hard to write long, sweeping, explanatory narratives. Wellek is right that tracing literary “influence” will never by itself suffice. If we aspire to produce connected historical explanations, our works will usually tend to become less literary. But if we restrict ourselves purely to literature, on the other hand, we may fail to explain the phenomena we describe. The formal solution Wellek proposes to this dilemma is valid: instead of aspiring to explain everything causally, it often does make sense to contrast periods, case studies, or ideal types. But this doesn’t mean that literary historians have to make a firm and final choice between intrinsic and extrinsic (non-literary) kinds of explanation. In the present study, for instance, I try to explain the causal connections between literary and social phenomena within the scope of each chapter, but I don’t pretend to explain all the social changes that intervene between chapters— between (say) London in  and the United States in . I bracket the challenging task of causal explanation on that larger scale, because social history would otherwise take over the narrative and divert the book from its literary and intellectual subjects. This is not a new solution, and it may not be a perfect one. My point is simply that the choice between intrinsic and extrinsic factors never has to be an all-or-nothing question. Wellek presents it as an all-or-nothing choice because he tends to interpret it as a question of disciplinary autonomy. In the  version of the argument he comments, for instance, that “topics like ‘Women as Healers in Mediaeval Life and Literature’ are being accepted by the foremost American universities for the doctorate in English.” This may seem harmless—a mere “terminological confusion,” In practice, there is, however, a very real danger that this terminological confusion of genres will be detrimental to the central aims of literary study. The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.35

The slippery-slope argument here wouldn’t be convincing if it were actually an argument about the content of scholarship. Intellectually, it is obviously possible to balance different subjects in an infinite variety of ways; there is

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no logical reason to assume that the introduction of subject B will inevitably evacuate A. The slippery-slope argument becomes convincing only because it is framed here as an argument about collective (disciplinary) autonomy. Where questions of collective honor are concerned, human beings do have a tendency to assume that all compromise leads inevitably to capitulation. So one must defend the border. Arguments of this form have been very common in literary studies, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. They should perhaps puzzle us a bit more than they do. It is after all not true that compromises between disciplines inevitably reduce one discipline or the other to a puppet state. They often produce new hybrid disciplines. Literary scholars have been very quick to assume that genuine literary study will be hollowed out whenever we borrow another discipline’s methods. At least in the early twentieth century, this anxiety seems to have been founded less on any immediate material fear about the fate of English departments than on a broader tension between the cultural and professional missions of higher education. Culture has an anomalous place in the university: it always seems to be in danger of being reduced to mere knowledge, and its professors to mere “Robots of Learning.” So when Wellek argues that literary history must either be organized around discontinuous “scales of value,” or subjugated to some “extraneous” standard, it seems fair to read his defense of periodization symptomatically. At bottom he is arguing that literary periods are necessary for reasons of disciplinary autonomy. Only division into periods (conceived as incommensurable “systems of norms”) can preserve the properly cultural character of literary study. Without periodization, literature will inevitably be reduced to a province of some other discipline, and culture will be reduced to mere historical explanation.

The Fate of Comparative Literature, and Why We Fail to Remember It Wellek’s argument about periodization was enormously influential. The Theory of Literature that contained his account of the cultural necessity of periodization became one of the most widely-reprinted works of literary scholarship in the twentieth century. It was translated into at least thirteen languages, and it is difficult to count the number of international editions

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it went through; I stopped counting at thirty. Wellek’s debate with Lovejoy also had substantial influence, at any rate in America: several critics agree that recent debates about periodization have tended to rehearse the terms of the Lovejoy-Wellek dispute.36 In the specific case of American comparative literature, there can be no doubt of Wellek’s importance: he was central to the postwar resurgence of the field, and helped to found Comparative Literature, the first American journal in the subject. (Wellek’s critique of Lovejoy was in fact featured in the first issue of Comparative Literature.) In the s, Wellek used his eminence to stamp out remnants of the older, prewar version of the comparative project, devoted to influence and other forms of continuity. His  essay on “The Crisis in Comparative Literature,” for instance, condemns parts of the field that have “clung to ‘factual relations,’ sources and influences,” or for that matter to “causal explanation” at all. Comparative Literature should abandon its special concern with causality, and become instead a term “for any study of literature transcending the limits of one national literature.”37 Since this is now the only meaning of the term we remember, Wellek’s proposal was evidently well received. On the other hand, I don’t want to exaggerate Wellek’s personal significance. The most important evidence in this chapter is still negative evidence: it’s the fact that the ambitious anthropological goals of comparative literature in the period – never achieved more than a slight effect on the literary curriculum. Here and there a course title was rephrased to emphasize “development” or “transition.” But on the whole, the organizing logic of the literary curriculum remained unchanged. The curriculum was not reorganized to trace the transmission of motifs, or to explain the social evolution of literature. It continued to describe movements and periods as discontinuous cultural wholes. The critique of historical continuity launched by writers like Foerster and Wellek was only a belated justification for abandoning a project that had already failed to institutionalize itself on a curricular level. Moreover, even the intellectual critiques of that project seem to have been guided by an underlying curricular rationale. The fundamental reason why Foerster and Wellek rejected historical explanation as a mission for literary scholarship, after all, was that it failed to advance the discipline’s educational, cultural mission. So we may not have to choose between intellectual and social explanations for the persistence of the period survey course: the social basis of this struggle was fairly overt. Periodization persisted because it

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allowed literary scholars to avoid reliance on other disciplines, and organize themselves instead around contrasted systems of purely critical norms. I wouldn’t try to generalize this observation much beyond . Periodization may have persisted in the second half of the twentieth century for different social reasons. Toward the end of the century, the principle of periodization may even have begun to lose its grip on the curriculum, for reasons to be considered in the next chapter. But in the first half of the twentieth century, it seems plain that periodization endured, in spite of intellectual challenges, because it seemed fundamentally bound up with the cultural authority of literary study. Nominalistic approaches that dissolved literary history into a flux of motifs, ideas, and social structures seemed to undermine the discipline’s cultural raison d’être. So, in spite of the prestige of similar models in biology, anthropology, and history, they were rejected by professors of literature. This historical account doesn’t necessarily produce any prescriptive conclusion about the curriculum today. I have acknowledged that literary periods are a solution to a real problem: it is difficult to explain literary change over long stretches of time without being drawn away from literature and into social history. Substituting discontinuous contrast for explanation is one way to address that problem: it’s a solution that plays a justifiable role both in scholarship and in the literary curriculum. We might also need alternative solutions, but let us defer that question to the final chapter. I will venture to say two things here about literary theory after . First, once we recognize how much pre-war theoretical controversy pivoted on questions about continuity and causal explanation, it should become clear that many pronouncements on that topic after  have been rehearsing old disputes. In particular, I would suggest that Michel Foucault’s distinction between “genetic” and “genealogical” history became so popular in literary study partly because it dovetailed rather well with prevailing New Critical attitudes to history. Like the New Critics, Foucault took a firm stand against “continuous history”—a stand that remained consistent whether he was calling his method “archaeology” or “genealogy.” His rhetorical strategy also remained consistent: he attacked the premise of continuity by reading it as a symptom of scholars’ investment in the stability and permanence of subjectivity. In a  article “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” Foucault remarks, [I]f history could remain the chain of uninterrupted continuities . . . it would be a privileged shelter for consciousness: what it takes away from the latter

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by bringing to light material determinations, inert practices, unconscious processes . . . it would restore in the form of a spontaneous synthesis; or rather, it would allow it [consciousness] to pick up once again all the threads that had escaped it, to reanimate all those dead activities, and to become once again the sovereign subject in a new or restored light. Continuous history is the correlate of consciousness . . .38

In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (), Foucault pushes this symptomatic reading a step farther, arguing that continuous history attempts to establish not only the stability of “the sovereign subject” but “the immortality of the soul.” By contrast, Foucauldian genealogy is devoted to “the systematic dissociation of our identity.”39 I have found Foucault’s theses about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consistently enlightening, and don’t want to slight his work as a historian. But I do think that his methodological premises became widely cited in literary study partly because, in our discipline, they were far from iconoclastic. Professors of literature had been arguing since the early nineteenth century that historical cultivation should be produced, not by continuous narrative, but by contrasting “periods” that embodied incommensurable social systems. Even before literary study was institutionalized in universities, writers were representing literary culture as a dissociation of identity that recognized alienated pieces of the self in past social formations. This form of immortality could be every bit as appealing as genetic continuity. So by the middle of the twentieth century, the idea of discontinuity was not, in literary study, even slightly subversive. In the s, Foucault’s critique of continuity would have specifically echoed René Wellek’s recent and influential attack on the tracing of sources and influences in pre-New-Critical historicism. Foucauldian “genealogy” may have been controversial in history departments, but in literary study it offered an eloquent, philosophical rationale for an approach to history that was already dominant. To broaden this point slightly: our failure to recognize the congruence between Foucauldian and New Critical attacks on “continuity” is probably a symptom of a broader blind spot in literary study, which is, simply, a widespread amnesia about the whole history of the discipline before New Criticism. I have already mentioned that many comparatists believe their field was founded by European emigrés after World War II. But this oversight is part of a broader problem: literary scholars generally aren’t aware that literary theory existed before New Criticism, except for philology and a vaguely

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characterized belletrism. For instance, A Companion to Comparative Literature () includes a chapter by Kenneth Surin on the history of the discipline in America. “Prior to the s,” he says, “the field saw very little in the way of critical and cultural theory, for a couple of reasons. First, New Criticism was the dominant approach in literary studies in the United States . . .”40 He then tells a story where historicism has to be invented ab novo, after the s, in a wasteland that had previously known only theories of the autotelic text. In any subfield of literary studies this narrative would involve some striking omissions, but the irony is really painful in the context of comparative literature. “Comparative literature” was virtually synonymous with “literary theory” when it first hit American universities around the year , and at that time, “literary theory” meant an ambitious anthropological historicism. I suspect there is a great deal more we don’t remember about the history of literary studies in the early twentieth century. Paging through course catalogs from the period, I am continually taken aback by experimental courses like “The Magazine in America” () or “Motion Pictures: Their Appreciation and their Relation to Literature” (). I’m afraid the history of a discipline gets written by the victors, and the mid-century victory of New Criticism was very complete—so complete, in fact, that it nearly erased the whole institutional history preceding it. Until Gerald Graff wrote Professing Literature, many late-twentieth-century histories of literary study were actually histories “of literary criticism,” constructing an imaginary genealogy of the discipline that ran from Matthew Arnold through the likes of T. S. Eliot, and largely ignoring the institutional history of the university curriculum. It’s especially worth addressing this oversight now, because there are growing signs that literary study may be about to rehearse early-twentieth-century debates about the threat of “scientism” and “factualism” in our discipline. I’ll have something more to say about those topics in the final chapter.

5

Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status Anxieties of Historicism in the 1990s

I

the institutional foundations of literary historicism enjoyed remarkable stability. In the academy, for instance, periodization remained the primary organizing principle of literary curricula and professional communication from  to the present. Fierce wars were fought and refought over the proper way to teach period survey courses: should professors emphasize New Criticism or psychoanalysis, New Historicism or deconstruction? But all the while, the premise that period survey courses had to be taught, and that professors therefore had to be trained as period specialists, remained largely unchallenged. By the end of the century, however, an elegiac tone had begun to creep into discussions of historicism, both in the academy and in literary culture more broadly. Although the concrete institutional crisis affecting the humanities in Britain and the United States today is more severe than it was in the s— for obvious economic reasons—it may be useful to look back at that decade in order to understand how the basic institutions of literary culture lost so much of their authority. The loss of authority was already perceptible in the s, and was expressed in critical nonfiction, in fiction, and in film as a peculiar kind of anxiety about historical forgetfulness. In the end, I don’t think the concept of postmodernism offers a satisfactory explanation of the anxieties surrounding history in the s: the term expressed a will to selfperiodization that was a defensive symptom of the crisis at least as much as an illuminating analysis of it. But since the word has been very influential, a 136

n t he t w en t i e t h c en t u r y,

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discussion of historicism in the s probably has no choice but to begin as a discussion of postmodernism. The meaning of the term was of course itself a topic of contention. Was postmodernism a discrete artistic movement, a structural transformation of modernity as a whole, or merely a convenient synonym for “the period after the Second World War”? Although advocates and critics of postmodernity defined the term differently, they did concur on one point. The evocation of bygone eras that characterized postmodern art, fiction, and film was not to be taken at face value. Postmodern historical fiction, for instance, was not a nostalgic recreation of nineteenth-century realism. It was rather (if you believed Linda Hutcheon) a playful decentering of positivist epistemology, allowing readers to recognize history itself as a constructed narrative.1 Or, if you preferred Fredric Jameson’s grimmer interpretation, the historical turn in contemporary culture was a symptom of history’s disappearance: the consciousness of historical difference that might have supported nostalgia had vanished, to be replaced by a pastiche of interchangeable retro styles.2

Stories of Parallel Lives If the large philosophical claims made for and against postmodern historical fiction began to seem dated toward the end of the s, it is not because that mode of artistic production sputtered out, but because it was subsumed in broader trends as it matured. The frame-breaking gestures and stylistic quotation marks deployed by the “historiographical metafictions” of John Fowles and E. L. Doctorow were once received as challenges to the “transparency of historical referentiality.”3 The slightly later generation of historical novels that metamorphosed into motion pictures in the s were equally self-conscious. But their metafictional layering didn’t necessarily have the effect of reminding the reader that history is a linguistic construct. Novels like Possession and The Hours used metafiction not to distance the past, but to transmute historical representation into something like personal memory. They achieved this by relying on the premise of parallel lives, which entwines historical difference with characters’ private yearnings for a lost past. Actors, biographers, or critics set off on the trail of characters in an earlier historical period, who turn out to be in some sense their prototypes; an eerie isomorphy emerges between the contemporary and ancestral layers of the story. Harold Pinter’s screenplay for the  film version of The French

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Lieutenant’s Woman was one of the earliest examples of the pattern. John Fowles had endowed his  novel with an obtrusively modern narrator, but the parallel between storylines in separate centuries was Pinter’s addition— his way of translating narrative self-consciousness into the dramatic medium. The premise of parallel lives was particularly fertile between  and . A selective list of examples from that period might include Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor () and Chatterton (), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (), Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel [La Tabla de Flandes] (), Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia (), and the film Dead Again (), written by Scott Frank and directed by Kenneth Branagh. Film versions of Possession and of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours () attracted a substantial audience. One does need to be cautious about periodizing this genre, but it’s not necessary to go all the way back to Plutarch. In spite of their title, the Parallel Lives produce an unrelated pleasure; Plutarch compares his noble Grecians and Romans as if they could have been contemporaries, using congruences to point out ethical universals. The genre under discussion, by contrast, takes it for granted that actual repetition of the past is impossible; it attends to apparent echoes only in order to foreground the transmission of historical memory. A real continuity does exist, by contrast, between contemporary parallel-lives stories and Gothic tradition. Mid-century psychological Gothics like Du Maurier’s Rebecca () and Hitchcock’s Vertigo () implied that contemporary characters were possessed by ancestral models who led them to reenact the traumas of the past. Indeed, Gothic novels have been playing changes on the notion that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons ever since Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto; it is a favorite Gothic way of thinking about history. But ancestral possession carried very different class implications in older works than it does in recent examples. This perhaps goes without saying for a writer like Walpole. But even in mid-twentieth-century psychological thrillers, the drama of ancestral possession differed from more recent examples in being staged as a compulsion to re-enact an oppressive masquerade. In Rebecca and Vertigo, the layer of the story hidden in the past dramatizes a set of values that ought to be vanishing; its power to reach from the grave and enthrall middle-class protagonists suggests the covert survival of class distinction in a society that had ostensibly outgrown such things. The protagonists struggle to throw off the enthrallment and content themselves with a (presumably natural) middle-class identity. Not surprisingly, these

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stories reached a broad middle-class audience; Rebecca, for instance, was an important prototype for the large and profitable Gothic romance industry.4 When texts from the s and s explore the premise of parallel lives, the resurgence of the past is not felt as a threat. The characters in the older layer of the story are portrayed sympathetically; in fact, the plot shuttles between two different epochs, and two sets of protagonists who receive roughly equal attention. Although events in the contemporary story still eerily reproduce the past, that connection ultimately deepens the living characters’ sensibilities and lifts them out of a sordid environment. This is not to deny that their personal safety may be menaced along the way; in Dead Again and The Flanders Panel, for instance, the discovery of a forgotten crime threatens to turn into a reenactment of it. But the danger is now overcome by closer identification with the past, not by an effort to throw off its spell. The contemporary genre’s insistence on this conclusion is measurable by the moral anomalies it is willing to create in order to reach it. As the title of Dead Again might suggest, the film ends happily when the past lives of its protagonists usurp and replace the drab present-day identities that were initially introduced to the audience. Aesthete-murderers who craft a parallel between past and present crimes are the most interesting characters in Hawksmoor and The Flanders Panel; though they initially take the form of detective stories, both novels end by moving back into the villain’s consciousness and celebrating its mysterious persistence across time. The parallel-lives premise leaves fewer moral loose ends in works like Stoppard’s Arcadia and Byatt’s Possession, which give up all attempt to make the past menacing, and create tension instead by letting the double-layered plot generate dramatic irony. The audience sees contemporary characters misled by gaps in the written record, and wonders whether they will ever discover the full truth about their predecessors. But all these versions of the parallel-lives story differ from the psychological Gothic in refusing to take the oppressive weight of history seriously. The real source of suspense lies in a struggle to remember and recreate a past threatened by oblivion. That conflict is most intelligibly described from a point of view located in the past, which is in fact the point of view that usually gets the last word in these works: the real conflict is the struggle of the dead to transmit their identities to the future. In a sense this is a return to an older model of historical fiction. Writers of historical novels have long been aware that readers’ fascination with the past is partly composed of a desire to prove that collective memory is stronger than

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death. As far back as Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, historical novels have hinted at their own resemblance to funerary ritual.5 In staging spiritual possession and exhumation as redemptive events, works like Possession and Dead Again are perhaps less like Hitchcock than like the spiritualist historical fictions of George Sand and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which literalized collective memory as physical immortality. But the parallel-lives stories that have sprung up over the last two decades revive the historical novel’s traditional concern with mortality in order to make it a vehicle for contemporary social anxieties— especially anxiety about the declining prestige of culture relative to other forms of social distinction.6 The cycle of death and resurrection in these works is also a quest for social status. Although the connection is developed differently in each case, the outlines of a pattern become clear. The protagonists in the earlier layer of the double plot are always knowledge workers, and usually artists. They include, in the works so far cited, a composer, a pianist, an architect, a novelist, two painters, two mathematicians, and four poets. (I’ll have more to say about those interloping mathematicians in a moment.) These characters soon discover that their profession does not confer the expected prestige: because intellectual achievements are trumped by poverty (Ackroyd’s Thomas Chatteron) or gender prejudice (Byatt’s Christabel LaMotte and Stoppard’s Thomasina Coverley), or because the market for culture has shifted under their feet (Roman Strauss, in Dead Again, can get paid for film music but not for the opera he wants to finish). Typically they console themselves with fantasies of historical resurrection. La Motte compares herself to Milton’s phoenix: “And though her body die, her fame survives / A secular bird, ages of lives.”7 Chatterton has a dying vision of the painters and writers who will revive his name in subsequent ages. “I will not wholly die,” he concludes. “I will live for ever . . . .”8 So far this is a familiar romantic story: the neglected genius acquires immortal life as an influence on cultural history. But the contemporary layers of parallel-lives plots frustrate the expected resurrection, and draw out the underlying conflict, which now reveals itself more explicitly as a threat to the prestige of culture. To begin with, the contemporary protagonists tend to be critics, biographers, or artists who restore old paintings, instead of primary producers of culture. They feel like epigones, and that fact already suggests some interruption of their predecessors’ legacy. Moreover, they are overshadowed within their own epigonal fields by competitors more at

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ease with the mass media. The schemes of these competitors often interfere with the immortality sought by the protagonists in the earlier layer of the story: in Possession, for instance, the critic Mortimer Cropper steals texts and memorabilia for his own collection, justifying it with a little sermon about electronic reproduction and “the museum of the future.” In Arcadia, Bernard Nightingale’s quest to be quoted in articles with headlines like “Bonking Byron Shot Poet” muddies the historical waters, and obscures the contributions of less famous nineteenth-century figures who have become more interesting to the audience.9 In some cases, the threat to the immortality of the past also develops fatal consequences in the present. Charles Wychwood, the unpublished twentieth-century poet who is the protagonist of Chatterton, suffers from a brain disease that is at least partly professional anxiety. A friend sums up the threat in these terms: “There is no history any more. There is no memory. There are no standards to encourage permanence—only novelty, and the whole endless cycle of new objects. And books are simply objects— consumer items picked up and laid aside.”10 After struggling to refute this claim, Charles loses consciousness and collapses. The lament is familiar: it sounds a bit like Sven Birkerts worrying about the future of reading and “deep time” in The Gutenberg Elegies (), and a bit like Fredric Jameson worrying about the fate of history in Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (). And in fact historical fiction does help illuminate recent cultural theory. It is hardly a closely-guarded secret that theorists have lately been anxious about the material and social status of the cultural professions.11 The parallel-lives genre suggests that the same anxiety may also inform the elegy for memory (or “historicity” or “deep time”) that has lately flourished in various guises in different academic disciplines. By staging the declining value of culture as a threat to earthly immortality, stories of parallel lives remind us that modern conceptions of culture have conferred prestige above all by identifying the cultured individual with processes of historical change. These stories also demonstrate how, as a consequence of that identification, threats to the prestige of culture can be felt as threats to history itself. I propose that recent elegies for historical memory reflect the disappearance, not of history or memory (which so far seem to have survived the s), but of something smaller that was nevertheless of great value to college-educated professionals, and especially to cultural intellectuals. What we have lost is our ability to believe in cultural history as a form of collective immortality.

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This may help explain why so many contemporary stories of parallel lives, in attempting to shore up that belief, return in particular to the period between  and . The belief in historical immortality that seems now to be waning developed in that period. By subordinating universal standards to the idea of historical change, romantic historicism hollowed out older ideas of fame. “No human monument,” Herder observed, “can endure intact and eternal, for it was formed in the stream of generations only by the hands of a certain time for that time.”12 This is more than an empirical observation that reputations fade and monuments crumble; the point is rather that no monument or ideal can hope to be as fundamental, as absolute, as change itself. But in sealing the fate of Ozymandias, historicism also opened up new forms of immortality. One could wager the future not on immutability, but on flux. If writers and thinkers were agents through which history worked its changes, they could imagine themselves as unacknowledged legislators of the world. They would acquire immortality not primarily through fame, but by becoming part of the ceaseless transformation that is history. The more perfectly they crystallized the spirit of their own passing age, the more directly they served history’s eternal logic. Culture was not just one among many forms of social prestige; through historicism, it claimed to encompass and transcend them all. Recall the mathematicians who interposed themselves in that list of composers, painters, and poets. Recent stories of parallel lives are not necessarily about “culture” in the narrow sense of the fine arts. But neither are they about “cultural capital” in the broad sense Pierre Bourdieu assigns that phrase, which expands to include all forms of symbolic authority and educational attainment.13 Accountants (no matter how highly credentialed) do not become protagonists of parallel-lives narratives; but mathematicians can (in Stoppard’s Arcadia) because they are understood to make discoveries and thereby embody history. We see in this genre the persistence of a particular kind of cultural distinction that amounts to identification with history as a horizon of difference and change. Here I part company from thinkers who have argued that culture derives its cachet from nationalism or from attempts to regulate a national vernacular. Bill Readings, for instance, saw transnational corporations as the main force dissolving the ideal of culture in the late twentieth century; reasoning backwards from that observation, he concluded that the nineteenth-century ideal of culture created prestige by identifying the individual with an organic

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national tradition now under attack by transnational forces.14 What this argument doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge is the close affinity between the nineteenth-century ideal of culture and the cosmopolitan classicism that immediately preceded it. Although classicism was widely appropriated for nationalist purposes (as in the French Revolution), even then the prestige it conferred was rooted in its claim to transcend national identity. The nineteenth-century ideal of culture retains a similar aspiration, although instead of embodying universality in an ostensibly permanent classical ideal, it defines it as consciousness of historical difference. The cultured individual becomes a temporal cosmopolitan, not by grasping the eternal, but by appreciating the singular and ephemeral. “To him,” as Walter Pater put it, “all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question he asks is always:—In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself?”15 Culture thus promised immortality to its consumers as well as its producers. The cultured reader’s claim to have been “wrought upon by . . . all modes of thought and life” parallelled the writer’s claim to embody the spirit of his or her age.16 Both were ways of identifying with the eternity of history itself, which was grasped, not as an overarching teleology or a principle of eternal recurrence, but in the ephemeral singularities that distinguished an infinite series of different historical forms receding into the past. As Carolyn Williams remarks in a study of Pater’s “aesthetic historicism,” these disparate historical moments are unified only through the critic’s retrospective gaze, and only because that gaze is treated as analogous to personal memory. “This structural analogy between personal memory and historical retrospection . . . places the aesthetic critic beyond historical time, even as he bends his attention to the absolute particularity of things in time.”17 The distinction at stake in stories of parallel lives is strongly linked to historicism. One of the notable features of this genre is its interest in the history of science—paleontology in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, mathematics and thermodynamics in Arcadia, paleontology and marine biology in Possession. This is a way of asserting intellectual breadth, to be sure. But it is also a way of narrowing the definition of culture, by making clear that what counts as culture is not a generalized aesthetic sensibility, but consciousness of historical difference (whether in the arts or in the sciences). The threat to culture, moreover, is expressed in these stories as a threat to

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the belief that participation in history makes one immortal. The sciences of change—paleontology and thermodynamics—become in this connection double-edged. As regions where discoveries can be made, they evoke a possibility of immortality. But the discoveries themselves suggest a danger of obsolescence or extinction. Though The French Lieutenant’s Woman is not itself a story of parallel lives, the interplay between its protagonist and its knowingly modern narrator serves many of the same purposes. Charles Smithson, Fowles’s protagonist, feels himself a “poor living fossil”: “the enormous apparatus rank required a gentleman to erect around himself was like the massive armor that had been the death warrant of so many ancient saurian species.”18 At this point, the narrator intervenes to make clear that fossilization threatens not only the nineteenth-century aristocracy, but any class that defines itself by values other than wealth—including both “the tender humanists who begin to discern their own redundancy,” and the scientists who invented the computer that is making those humanists redundant. The real threat is not technology, but the “pursuit of money,” which fuels evolutionary change. “The scientist is but one more form; and will be superseded.” In spite of the bleakness of Fowles’s language, the analogy to evolution is ultimately consoling. It suggests that “[W]hat dies is the form. Matter is immortal. There runs through this succession of superseded forms we call existence a certain kind of afterlife.”19 Historical consciousness is thus in the end confirmed as the one principle that resists and transcends the leveling power of commerce. The rhetoric of evolutionary succession in The French Lieutenant’s Woman gives its protagonist a plausibly nineteenth-century vocabulary for worrying a twentieth-century question: Can knowledge workers still locate themselves in the main line of cultural “evolution”—or are they now dead ends, throwbacks, living fossils? In Arcadia, the analogy between this problem and the quest for personal immortality is made explicit. Bernard Nightingale is a literary critic who has published a flashy but dubious claim about Byron. Hannah: If Bernard can stay ahead of getting the rug pulled till he’s dead, he’ll be a success. Valentine: Just like science . . . The ultimate fear is of posterity . . . Hannah: Personally I don’t think it’ll take that long. Valentine: . . . and then there’s the afterlife. An afterlife would be a mixed blessing. “Ah—Bernard Nightingale, I don’t believe you know Lord Byron.” It must be heaven up there.20

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The exchange is more than a joke about a researcher’s fear of being proved wrong in heaven. The uneasiness it evokes is central to the comedy of Bernard’s character: a scholar who fails to believe in the permanence of his subject, he instead chases the transitory fame of talk shows and tabloid headlines, frankly out to grab whatever he can before death. If Bernard believed in the dialectic— vaster than empires and more slow—that is supposed to underwrite the prestige of his class, he might conceivably look forward to being corrected as an immortalizing sublation. But he lacks faith in that sort of afterlife, and instead frantically converts history to celebrity, as it if were a currency losing value. Although Bernard is a comic butt, the declining value of that currency is a threat the play takes seriously. The premise of parallel lives permits writers to acknowledge, but symbolically resolve, that threat. On the literal level of the plot, traces of cultural history that seemed to be permanently obscured by social or economic prejudice are recovered and recorded. This already suggests a promotion of cultural, over social and economic, sources of distinction. The structure of the double-layered plot also explicitly compares the permanence of culture to personal immortality: people who died long ago possess their cultural descendants and live again through them, proving that history is still a process by which the future transforms and partially resurrects the past. Characters who champion the mass media and/or electronic reproduction may delay and complicate this process of rebirth, but they pose the threat only so that it can be overcome. In Possession, for instance, two contemporary researchers reconstruct (and reproduce in their own persons) the personal and literary relationship between Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash, nineteenth-century poets. Their efforts are threatened when Mortimer Cropper, an advocate of electronic reproduction, secretly opens a grave and appropriates a box containing a letter from LaMotte that was never delivered or read. In an ironic reversal of his ostensible commitment to electronic publicity, Cropper plans to keep the letter as a private possession. But the contemporary researchers are able to interrupt the grave robbery and turn it into a resurrection: the letter is opened, part of LaMotte’s identity that seemed irretrievably lost is recovered—and assimilated, as it happens, by a researcher who turns out to be her biological descendant. In short, the parallel-lives genre reassures readers who fear that their investment in culture is losing value, by staging a plot in which the contemporary

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threat (diminished social status) is overcome by the original source of status (identification with the permanence of cultural history). But the genre’s literalization of cultural immortality as exhumation and resurrection is by no means naïve; it reveals a frank understanding of the fantastic aspect of the original desire. For this reason, the most thoughtful examples of the genre often end by returning to the past, to take a lingering look at some detail that failed to be preserved and reproduced.21 The postscript to Possession, for instance, reveals that a second message, from Ash to LaMotte, went astray in a way that will hide it forever from the intended recipient and from historians. In the final scene of Arcadia, nineteenth-century characters spill over unobserved into preparations for a twentieth-century costume party; the play ends with two couples waltzing in Regency dress, on the same stage in different centuries. The image itself proposes that history is immortality: historical consciousness (in the form of costume drama) seems to guarantee the eternal recurrence of each moment of experience. But the waltz equally dramatizes an emotional connection between the two nineteenth-century characters, which the audience knows will be destroyed when one of them dies in a fire to take place after the curtains close. The twentieth-century characters who are waltzing never learn the full truth about that nineteenth-century relationship, and are not themselves lovers. The visuals, in short, evoke a longing to believe that cultural history immortalizes experience, while the facts of the plot deny it.

Immortality and Memory in Cultural Theory It is perhaps not surprising to find that the anxieties about cultural prestige dramatized in s historical fiction also colored the era’s cultural theory. What is slightly surprising is that theorists were just as willing as novelists and screenwriters to represent the problem fantastically, as a threat to immortality. David Simpson has remarked that the desire “to speak with the dead”—in Stephen Greenblatt’s now-famous phrase—is a central animating principle in contemporary criticism, and especially in the celebration of local knowledge he defines as “the academic postmodern.” “What are the autobiographies, the anecdotes, the conversations, the photographs (in even the most skeptical biographies), and the local knowledges . . . if not variations on the effort at giving life to what is otherwise threateningly (if also safely) dead?” For Simpson this is evidence both of academics’ professional investment in the interminability of

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historical interpretation, and of their longing for a worldly efficacy that interminable discussion seems forever to defer. The novels and works of criticism that revive the dead address both needs at once by proving that after all “literature is life, and life is literature.”22 While I entirely concur with Simpson’s thesis, I think it is possible to enlarge it. For although the desire to speak with the dead subsumes within it a number of specifically professional imperatives, it is at the most general level nothing less than a reaffirmation of cultural immortality. And it can be found not only in the disciplines of history, anthropology, and literary studies, but in films like Dead Again, and in works of popular criticism, like Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies (), that address an educated but not necessarily academic audience. Birkerts argues that the transition from print to electronic culture entails drastic phenomenological changes, of which the most uncanny is a flattening of time itself. One function of print culture was to “keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.” Reading thereby made it possible to move from “the idea of time as simple succession” to the experience of “deep time.”23 That last phrase is borrowed from John McPhee, who used it to suggest that the time latent in rocks is so remote from the scale of human life that it immobilizes mortality: “you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”24 Birkerts’s account of reading implies that the cultural time latent on the printed page performs a similar transformation. When I am at the finest pitch of reading, I feel as if the whole of my life—past as well as unknown future—were somehow available to me. Not in terms of any high-definition particulars (reading is not clairvoyance) but as an object of contemplation. At the same time, I register a definite awareness that I am, in the present, part of a more extensive circuit, a circuit channeling what Wallace Stevens called “the substance in us that prevails.”25

The passage begins by proposing that reading allows the reader to step out of the flow of time to contemplate her own life as a timeless object. This is a kind of personal immortality, and indeed the next page goes on to say that reading makes one’s “soul” present to oneself. But reading also gives one access to a circuit that seems to be “more extensive” both because it is collective and because it extends backwards and forwards in time. That circuit “channels” (in a sense somewhere between spiritualism and radio) a tacitly communal

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“substance in us that prevails.” Birkerts’s discussion of “deep time” thus turns out to involve an equation between culture and collective immortality like the one implicit in parallel-lives stories. And, like the authors of those stories, he suggests that electronic communications threaten to interrupt immortality (though he also appropriates the electronic “circuit,” interestingly enough, as a metaphor for historicist culture). Anxiety about immortality is as widespread on the cultural left as it is in costume dramas or in Birkerts’s culturally conservative elegy for reading. When academics on the left reaffirm cultural immortality, they tend to do so by idealizing scholarship’s power to rescue otherwise forgotten and silenced voices—an idealization particularly noticeable in the growing subfield of historical studies devoted to the reconstruction of “memory.” The concept of collective memory is not new, but recent academic discussions of the topic seem to form a distinct project dating from the s, indebted in particular to Pierre Nora’s seven-volume collection Les lieux de mémoire (–).26 In his influential introduction to that collection, Nora argues that the proliferation of recording technologies and historical archives has marginalized “memory,” which now survives only “in gestures and habits, unspoken craft traditions, intimate physical knowledge, ingrained reminiscences, and spontaneous reflexes.”27 This argument, which identifies tradition with the body and with subjectivity, might appear to have conservative implications. But as Kerwin Klein has pointed out, it has received a surprisingly positive reception from historians interested in ethnic and postcolonial identity, who have interpreted Nora’s concept of “memory” as “a form of counterhistory that challenges the false generalizations in exclusionary ‘History.’”28 This strange alliance becomes easier to comprehend if one interprets recent academic interest in collective memory as a reaffirmation of the social status conveyed by historicist culture. The ostensible opposition between history and memory collapses in practice, because (as Nora stresses) memory no longer exists as living tradition, but only in lieux de mémoire—“sites” of memory fragmented and fossilized by history, ranging from Proust’s madeleine to the defunct revolutionary calendar. The boundary between memory and history is thus illusory; it functions mainly as a rhetorical strategy for repackaging history. The boundary that Nora actually cares about falls between a conception of history as the electronic transcription of events (“the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the image”), and a different aesthetic centered on lieux de mémoire—fossils which both represent

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and partly redress the obsolescence of memory, by revealing the past’s double existence as corpse and as eternity. Lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains: the ultimate embodiments of memorial consciousness in a history that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it. What brings the notion forth is the deritualization of our world—which produces, manifests, establishes, constructs, decrees, and maintains by artifice and by will a society fundamentally absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, by its very nature valuing the new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past. Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, fraternal orders—these are mounds marking the edge of another age, illusions of eternity.29

This is a dirge for historicist culture. It expresses not anxiety about the loss of a particular (simpler or more gracious) way of life, but about a marginalization of “eternity” as such by the people who produce, establish, construct, decree, and maintain the present. It also evokes an inherent opposition between eternity and capitalism (emblematized particularly by electronic media). Compare, for instance, Andreas Huyssen’s claim that “capitalist culture with its continuing frenetic pace, its television politics of quick oblivion, and its dissolution of public space in ever more channels of instant entertainment is inherently amnesiac.”30 Nora’s response to this threat closely resembles the way recent stories of parallel lives respond to the devaluation of historicist culture: he seeks out fragments of the past that were never fully incorporated into their own age, and which therefore have the potential to wake to a second existence in the present. The fragmentary quality of these lieux de mémoire represents the contemporary crisis of memory, while their rebirth in the present symbolically resolves it. As a paradigmatic example, Nora offers the revolutionary calendar: an attempted intervention in collective memory that qualifies as a lieu de mémoire because it failed to endure as a living tradition, and so could return for a second life in scattered allusions to Thermidor or Brumaire—half memory, half object of historical study. More than anything else, “this dual identity” defines lieux de mémoire: “moments of history are plucked out of the flow of history, then returned to it; no longer quite alive but not yet entirely dead, like shells left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.” Announcing that these fossils form “an unconscious organization of collective memory that it is up to us to bring to consciousness,” Nora defines a program for historians that

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closely resembles the imperative to exhume unopened letters and consummate unconsummated relationships that drives the detective protagonists of recent historical fiction.31 Neither group is really concerned with living memory: they go in search of what was stillborn, and give it belated life, in order to experience history’s partial triumph over its own obsolescence. The politics of Nora’s project are open to debate; though it has been welcomed by the postcolonial left, it is “in its French context,” as Klein notes, “more nearly a conservative plaint about the fragmentation of French identity.”32 Walter Benn Michaels and Ian Baucom have staged a similar debate about the politics of an equivalent American discourse, which uses metaphors of spiritualism and recovered memory to grapple with the historical trauma of slavery. For Baucom, this approach gives voice to a “counter-Enlightenment philosophy of history,” whereas for Michaels it expresses a nostalgic attempt to consolidate a stable cultural identity.33 For a less politically equivocal example of the discourse of historical memory, one might turn to Fredric Jameson, whose central theses about postmodernity can be understood as materialist formulations of the anxiety other writers have expressed in terms of memory or deep time. Jameson defines the problem as a “crisis in historicity”—that is, a crisis in our ability to perceive “the present as history.” The very facility of stylistic periodization in postmodernity makes it difficult for works of art to defamiliarize the present or to represent its relation to the past. According to Jameson, postmodernity “has forgotten how to think historically” because capital has finally succeeded in commodifying time itself, congealing historical difference into retro style.34 Although Jameson formulates the crisis in insistently material terms, he too represents it as a threat to immortality. Postmodern amnesia is a problem because history is necessary “for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations.” Since it is “the retrospective dimension necessary for any vital reorientation of our collective future,” this ritual remembrance of the dead also guarantees the future vitality of the community—always an important function of funerary rituals.35 Of course, Jameson is talking about politics. But for Jameson, the point of political interpretation is really to do what funerary ritual does in religion: to reaffirm the continuity of collective existence. This theme was already central to The Political Unconscious (): Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-

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forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. . . . These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story . . . only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot . . . .36

A revenant who represents historical difference as wisdom from beyond the grave, Tiresias is in this passage a bit like Pater’s La Gioconda—though admittedly, a Marxist critic’s identification with historical time is not interchangeable with an aesthete’s. Jameson is on his guard, as a matter of course, against any reification of history as “culture” one could acquire. But this does not mean that he scorns cultural immortality: it means only that he understands what it is. Since Jameson frankly acknowledges a desire to overcome death by identifying with “a single great collective story,” he doesn’t need to disguise that desire as a celebration of reading, or of somatic memory. But he has as much reason as Birkerts or Nora to be troubled by a decline in “the mystery of the cultural past,” because Marxist literary interpretation still needs to show that superseded social forms speak to the present, not in spite of but (herein lies the mystery) because of their contingent specificity.

How Postmodernism Misrecognized Itself as a Threat to “Historical Continuity” In short, the elegies for historicism that appeared in the s expressed an oddly consistent concern with immortality. Writers of popular nonfiction, like Sven Birkerts, worried that electronic media were destroying a timeless connection that reading had once created between the present and the past. Fiction, drama, and film staged a similar threat, and used the premise of parallel lives to address it through symbolic resurrection. In academia, the discourse of historical “memory” represented the historian’s task in terms that were strikingly similar to the plot of a parallel-lives narrative: when memory itself is under siege, it is no longer enough to reconstruct the past—one has to tease out its living traces in the present. Fredric Jameson articulated the problem in a similar if more melancholy way, lamenting that the flattening of history into pop-cultural images and simulacra prevented “the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations.”37 From the perspective of the twenty-first century, these anxieties may sound dated, and I agree that the threat to “history” that writers described in the s never did exist in the general, sweeping form they postulated. The

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flowering of the parallel-lives genre has special relevance here, for although its protagonists often share Jameson’s anxieties, the genre itself tends to refute his thesis of a postmodern crisis in historicity. After all, Jameson’s evidence for that crisis included the observation that the historical novel and the costume film have “fallen into disrepute and infrequency”; an observation that went to print just as both forms were entering a prolonged boom in sales and prestige.38 Moreover, the historical novels of the late s and s actually promoted a rather materialistic vision of history. Sally Shuttleworth has pointed out that “the retro-Victorian novel” is extremely careful “to offer a broad materialist picture of Victorian culture” rather than a mere “drama of ideas.”39 One could add that historical novels relying on the parallel-lives premise excel specifically at representing “a past history which was once itself a present”—a nineteenth-century achievement that Jameson represented as lost to his own age. Of the charges one might level against fiction written in the last two decades, the claim that it “has forgotten how to think historically” seems to me one of the least plausible. Why then did writers in the s believe that they were experiencing a crisis of “historicity”? Here I think stories of parallel lives, with their emphasis on metaphors of resurrection, provide a vivid clue. What was felt to be threatened was not the possibility of thinking historically, so much as the prestige attached to historical cultivation—prestige that had been represented since the nineteenth century as participation in collective immortality. Historical cultivation was supposed to bracket parochial present-day celebrity, and give readers imaginative access to a wider range of standards—immortal not in the sense that they were unchanging, but in the sense that their endless multiplicity became itself a kind of permanence. Stories of parallel lives tend to begin in a world where this promise has already failed: present-day celebrity is triumphant, and the cultural past has lost its power to immortalize anything. The function of the mysterious “parallel” between past and present is to restore that immortality, and as I’ve noted above, the same metaphor of resurrection was echoed more subtly in cultural criticism. In a second way as well, I think stories of parallel lives offer a clearer guide to the cultural crises of the s than the period’s critical prose did: they clearly acknowledge that historical memory was threatened not by a loss of continuity but, paradoxically, by a loss of discontinuity. The attraction of the genre fundamentally depends on the premise that the two layers of the narrative are separated by a culturally significant lapse of time. Without that lapse of time,

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all the magic of the parallel would be lost, and the story would collapse into a routine drama of imperiled inheritance. While it is true that the conflict in these stories often hinges on the transmission of some message or legacy from past to present, the transmission becomes interesting precisely because it isn’t continuous, but involves the apparent resurrection of something long dead. This structural feature of the genre faithfully captures the historicist logic that had governed culture since the nineteenth century. Culture has a prestige that differs from the authority of mere custom in part because it is supposed to transcend continuity. If critics still write occasionally about cultural “tradition,” it is understood that this tradition is of a special sort which, as T. S. Eliot famously explained, has nothing to do with “following the ways of the immediate generation before us,” but rather “with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”40 This gives the cultured reader freedom from immediate precedent at the same time as it connects him or her to an imaginatively larger (if more diffuse) kind of authority—a connection that is elegantly dramatized by the mysterious link to an arbitarily remote past that lifts the protagonists of parallel-lives narrative out of their quotidian surroundings. Cultural criticism has had a blind spot on this topic for the last thirty years, persistently misrecognizing challenges to historical cultivation as challenges to an ideal of historical “continuity.” Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the failure of all “master narratives” was echoed ten years later by David Harvey’s claim that “postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity and memory.”41 While Jameson expressed skepticism about Lyotard’s phrase “master narrative,” he too tended to characterize postmodernism as a crisis of historical connectivity—one that produced “heaps of fragments,” and undermined “the notion of progress and telos.”42 This seems to me a case where cultural critics got the spirit of their own age exactly wrong. While critics were defining a new period characterized by the disappearance of all coherence, continuity, and progress, popular assumptions about history were converging on a master narrative with a Whiggish coherence unmatched since the eighteenth century—a narrative that not only reaffirmed “progress and telos,” but affirmed that the telos of history had in fact been achieved. The best-known statement of this premise was Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that “at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History

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of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy.”43 Of course, Fukuyama’s timely thesis about the “end of history” gave expression to a mood of liberal triumphalism that had been gestating for several decades before the end of the Cold War. But I would suggest that it also gave expression to a broader, less specifically political suspicion that all forms of historical change had for some time been slowing down. In , the same year Fukuyama published his original article on “The End of History” in The National Interest, John Horgan “began to think seriously about the possibility that science, pure science, might be over,” because it had achieved its goal or begun to encounter fundsmental limits to human knowledge—an argument he published in  as The End of Science.44 Meanwhile, a wide range of observers noted that science fiction seemed to have lost its aspirational energy, to be replaced by campy nostalgia for an imagined future of jet-packs and moon bases that had somehow failed to materialize. Words like “technostalgia” and “retrofuturism” are characteristic coinages of the s. In one sense, the popular perception that history had slowed down (or even come to an end) might seem to justify cultural critics’ claim that the late twentieth century had abandoned “master narratives” and lost “all sense of historical continuity.” It is true that the era had ceased to expect the sort of continuity that might interest a Hegelian, involving the ceaseless unfolding of a single dialectic. But this doesn’t mean that late twentieth-century observers had ceased to believe in progress; they had merely come to suspect that it lay for the most part in the past. And if “continuity” means a belief that the whole of history can be explained by a single overarching logic, then arguments like Fukuyama’s assert it in the strongest possible terms. Fukuyama proposes to explain all of human history in terms of two universal principles: the advance of natural science (which he sees as producing capitalism) and a “struggle for recognition” (which he sees as producing democracy). The particulars of his account would be difficult to defend (to put it mildly), but what I want to highlight here is a broadly shared assumption that the achievements of the present provide a valid interpretive key to history as a whole. For Fukuyama the relevant achievement might be capitalism; for more recent popular-historical writers it might be the decentered and networked mode of communication embodied by the Internet. But the shared assumption, which dominates popular historical consciousness now to a degree unprecedented since the eighteenth century, is that the apparent differences between the present and earlier eras will collapse, on examination, into continuity.

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People who have spent their careers teaching history, or literary history, will object that this is merely the fallacy of presentism, about which there is nothing new. I agree that it is a kind of presentism; but that word imports evaluative assumptions that flatten out some important nuances. Arguments about the end of history are presentist in a newly unabashed way: they acknowledge that presentism was in the past a fallacy, while suggesting that it may cease to be a fallacy as we approach the end of history, since the stable universals underlying historical change have begun to be revealed. One doesn’t find many academics who are willing to make this argument as candidly as Fukuyama did, but it is an almost inevitable corollary of the popular impression that the pace of historical change has slowed, and its influence can be felt in many ways: from waning interest in futurist speculation to waning interest in cultural history. I have found it a useful thought experiment to ask myself whether I can imagine a contemporary British writer assuming, as casually as P. B. Shelley did, that “when St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, . . . some transatlantic commentator will be weighing” the merits of his work “in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism.”45 The key phrase here is “new and now unimagined.” We can envision a wide range of apocalypses at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some of which do threaten to turn London into a marsh, if it is not first overrun by the living dead. But all of these scenarios involve either the outright destruction of civilization, or a regression to a simpler and more violent past. The notion that cultural transformation will inevitably produce a new perspective “now unimagined” seems to me one that romantic writers embraced both more seriously and more easily than we are likely to do today. For a example that puts this premise to the test, one might consider the recent editorial by Kwame Anthony Appiah that asked “What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?” The question might seem to invite the classic historicist reflection that each generation is necessarily blind to the “now unimagined” perspectives located in its future. But the surprising premise of Appiah’s piece was that we probably do, after all, know which practices future generations will condemn, since a survey of the past reveals several recurring clues characterizing such practices—above all that “people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.”46 Appiah may be entirely right

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about this, and it may well be a politically constructive observation, but it is probably not the side of the question that a philosopher or cultural critic would have chosen to emphasize in the middle of the twentieth century. The confidence in continuity it expresses would at that time have seemed pedestrian and presentist. The inference I would draw is that the last forty years have not abandoned “all sense of historical continuity and memory,” as David Harvey suggested, but have been characterized on the contrary by a growing confidence in continuity. Cultural intellectuals have rightly perceived this as a crisis, however, because the prestige of historical cultivation has long hinged—as parallel-lives stories remind us—on the premise of discontinuity. If history is radically discontinuous then intellectuals can argue that present-day social standards have to be qualified by historicist culture, which serves as a placeholder for an infinite variety of possible alternate perspectives. If, on the other hand, we have reached a point where the present is finally right to imagine that it holds a privileged perspective, then the supplement of historical cultivation (of “culture” as we have known it for the last two centuries) is no longer particularly urgent. Parallel-lives stories respond very directly to this perceived crisis: they begin in a present that sees no alternative to its own ephemeral standards of celebrity, and reaffirm the necessity of historical culture through a fantasy about discontinuity, which takes the form of a mysterious gulf separating the two layers of the narrative. While it is true that the lives of present-day characters parallel those in the past, the parallel is not a proof of social continuity, but an imaginative, sympathetic connection between personalities that leaps over a long intervening period. Moreover, this parallel remains buried, powerless to solve present-day problems, until resurrected by historians who are exploring the peculiar literary, paleontological, or thermodynamic preoccupations of a vanished era. The characters in a parallel-lives story may express their anxieties about history as vaguely as cultural critics of the s did, lamenting the disappearance of a generalized “memory” or “permanence.”47 But the logic of fictional wish-fulfillment is more faithful than nonfiction prose to the paradox underlying late twentiethcentury cultural crises. The fiction of the s reveals that the authority of historicist culture depended, paradoxically, on a belief in impermanence.

6

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er i o d iz at i o n h a s b een c en t r a l to literary study since the discipline’s emergence. In the nineteenth century, periodized contrast gave middle-class writers a way of claiming cultural authority without relying on the aristocratic premise of unbroken lineage. In the twentieth century, periodization was defended as a proof that literary history transcended the philistine, causal continuities of the history department. But by the end of the twentieth century, this model of literary history had lost some of its authority. I suspect literary historians are still too close to this transition, both chronologically and emotionally, to do a good job of explaining it—so I have largely restricted myself to description. But it may be worth briefly sketching why explanation is difficult. Chapter  presented the declining authority of periodized contrast in an elegiac light, because that is generally the way popular fictions of the s imagined it. The specificity of the past seemed to be erased by the insistent contemporaneity of journalism, or by challenges to the print medium itself, or by an “end of history” that flattened majestic Hegelian processions into retro style. As we’ve seen, many of these elegiac hypotheses were echoed in the period’s cultural theory. But one might just as persuasively drop the elegiac tone, and present literary scholars themselves as agents who actively chose to discard an older mode of periodized historicism. One of the leitmotifs of new historicism, after all, was a narrowing of historical focus. This was reflected not just in the famously anecdotal openings of articles, but in a 157

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general contraction of temporal scope. Many new-historical arguments trace connections that unfold over a span of one, or two, or five years. What was actually happening in the Wye valley during Wordsworth’s visit? And what was Napoleon doing that July?1 As James Chandler has shown, there was nothing absolutely new about these fine-grained or “hot chronologies.” Moreover, it is always in principle possible to connect temporal specificity to a larger and looser calendar. P. B. Shelley could focus tightly on “England in ” but also zoom out to invoke “the spirit of the age.”2 Nevertheless, it seems likely that new modes of historicism did something to break up the authority of period concepts in the s and s. If I may add a new-historical anecdote of my own: the first thing I was told in graduate school, in , was to reframe questions about periods and movements as questions about spans of time no longer than five years.3 In a sense, this tightening of focus was a logical extrapolation of the concern with specificity that motivates historical contrast. But taken to an extreme, historical specificity can make itself disappear. If we make the resolution of historical representation fine enough, we end up with a smooth continuum of events rather than a sequence of discrete cultural formations that students could be asked to contrast to the present. Together with feminism, this finegrained and nominalistic strain of historicism may have helped motivate a fresh round of academic critiques of periodization (on which more later). But as I say, we may still be too close to these changes to explain how and why they took place. It is always easy to overestimate the causal power of academic writing. And it seems worth noting that the changes involved have not been limited to literary periods; they involve a broader set of attitudes about historical continuity and discontinuity. From Henri Saint-Simon to Karl Marx to Oswald Spengler, stadial models of history exerted a broad popular influence. Today, by contrast, popular historical works have little to say about stages of development, and seek instead to tease out general (if not exactly universal) principles. Works like Guns, Germs, and Steel emphasize technological and environmental factors that operate in multiple times and places.4 At its most exaggerated, the new faith in continuity can amount to a Whiggish presentism—illustrated, for instance, by Francis Fukuyama’s End of History.5 But I suspect for historians, this popular revival of gradualist approaches to history will pose a manageable, largely intellectual problem. The discipline of history has long seen itself as negotiating between the opposed principles of continuity and change, and the

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necessary trade-off between the two is for historians a cliché. When students were inclined to treat periods as discrete spiritual entities with a real existence, historians reminded them that period boundaries were only nominal and the unity of a period largely imaginary. Today it is probably necessary to lean harder on the opposite side of the question, reminding students that history is not a gradient that ascends smoothly from the invention of writing to the Internet. But both sides of that tension can be contained within history’s institutional structures and organizing assumptions. In literary studies, the waning prestige of periods poses a more difficult problem, because we aren’t accustomed to viewing this topic as a negotiation between equally valid principles. The cultural value of literary criticism has usually been articulated in terms of discrete cultural formations (romanticism, postmodernism), not in terms of the discipline’s power to explain continuous change. Many literary scholars feel a commitment to discontinuity that is almost moral in character, expressed as a celebration of fragments and rupture, or as a critique of master narratives. This chapter argues that a habit of narrating history as a sequence of contrasted cultural movements has caused literary studies to develop in a one-sided way, and produced blind spots that limit the development of the discipline. I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything illegitimate about dividing history into discrete movements and cultural “turns.” On the contrary, these concepts can be heuristically useful. But they have acquired a disproportionate power in literary studies, blinding us to other equally valid modes of historical imagination. I’ll argue that digital and quantitative methods are a valuable addition to literary study now, not only in their own right, but because their ability to represent gradual, macroscopic change brings a healthy theoretical diversity to literary historicism. “Digital humanities” is of course a complex rubric, covering a host of scholarly initiatives that are not explicitly quantitative, literary, or historical. The term also embraces theories of new media and new forms of scholarly communication. Even within literary history, digital scholarship has often focused on individual texts, illuminating them through textual editing or geospatial visualization. Computers can help us do many valuable things besides Franco Moretti’s “distant reading.” But I will argue that the topic of gradual change is a place where there is a specific, interlocking affinity between the new capacities of digital analysis and the existing blind spots of literary scholarship. Computers can do many things—but this is a kind of

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innovation that we particularly need, and a kind that would be impossible without digital assistance.

*** The enduring role of historical discontinuity in literary study is most obvious, perhaps, in the period boundaries that still organize teaching and hiring—although the cultural authority of these boundaries is increasingly up for debate. In the late s, for instance, Susan Wolfson and William Galperin proposed that the romantic period should be redefined as a “Romantic Century” stretching from  to .6 The proposal bore fruit in a triad of essays discussing the contours of nineteenth-century periodization in the October  issue of PMLA.7 Although this challenge to romantic periodization drew much of its energy from feminist recovery projects, it was not at bottom an empirical claim about the early nineteenth century, but a theoretical argument about literary history. Wolfson and Galperin advanced various reasons to believe that – might constitute a meaningful cultural unit, but the suspiciously round numbers they chose give the game away. They were in effect proposing to treat literary periods as nominal and flexible ways of directing attention to different segments of a historical continuum. It is too soon to say what lasting consequences may emerge from recent proposals to define the romantic era more loosely, or from parallel initiatives in other subfields that insist, for instance, on the plurality of “modernisms.” As many observers pointed out at the time, the debate about romantic periodization in the late s bore a striking resemblance to the early-twentieth century exchange between A. O. Lovejoy and René Wellek on “The Plurality of Romanticisms.” I’ve already traced the course of that argument in Chapter : in practice, it failed to dent literary scholars’ reliance on periodization, because Lovejoy’s attempt to dissolve periods into a flux of component ideas seemed to threaten the cultural rationale for literary studies’ existence as an autonomous discipline. It wasn’t clear that teaching students to trace processes of change would have the same kind of cultivating effect as teaching them to appreciate romanticism. Intellectually, the challenge to periodization has gained more ground in recent years than it ever gained in the early twentieth century. In the titles of scholarly books, for instance, words like “romantic” and “Victorian” have been displaced by hyphenated pairs of dates chosen to reflect the contours of particular topics. This might suggest that literary scholars are moving toward

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historians’ looser, problem-centered, ad-hoc approach to periodization. Moreover, literary debate about periodization increasingly takes for granted a nominalistic view of the question—identifying it with the problem of boundary-drawing, which is treated as a necessary evil.8 On the other hand, this is not a question that has been decided by intellectual arguments in the past. The power of periodization as a curricular institution, and mode of graduate specialization, seems undiminished. And in informal contexts one frequently hears periodization defended in terms that echo the explicitly disciplinary rationale of Wellek’s response to Lovejoy. At a moment when literature departments are under attack, it is said, we cannot afford to give up concepts like “modernism” that still give our discipline popular currency. I think contemporary discussions of periodization usually go astray by conflating the intellectual and social dimensions of this problem—as if the disciplinary authority of historical contrast rested on the mathematical convenience of period boundaries. Against the drawing of temporal boundaries no one can raise serious objections. It is arbitrary but very useful to divide the day into twenty-four hours. Anthologies need to begin and end somewhere. We might occasionally need to be warned about reifying such boundaries, but if they were really arbitrary conveniences rather than social institutions, this would be roughly as dangerous as reifying “July.” But the authority of periodization does not rest on the convenience of boundaries. It springs from a commitment to discontinuity that has long defined the cultural purpose of literary studies, and that contemporary scholars still feel as part of their disciplinary identity. This commitment to discontinuity goes far beyond the dates of anthologies and survey courses; it shapes critical discourse from top to bottom. One way to dramatize it is to consider pairs of terms that describe roughly the same concept, except that one of them approaches the concept from a diachronic and the other from a synchronic point of view. Typically, in literary studies, the synchronic term has more disciplinary authority. The concept of “influence” had a dubious position in twentieth-century scholarship, for instance, because it seemed to divert attention away from properly literary questions and toward an argument about causal continuity. Harold Bloom made his name in great part by solving that problem—by transforming influence from a causal concept into one that described a timeless agonistic relationship. When the bloom began to wear off his agonistic theory of influence, the word was replaced by “intertextuality,” a term that even more completely elided the whole

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question of temporal sequence, turning influence into a purely synchronic question. Historians may talk about influence; literary scholars talk about intertextuality. The late-twentieth-century ascendance of historicism changed this situation less than one might imagine. It remains difficult for literary scholars to use words that explicitly foreground causal sequence—words like “cause,” “source,” “origin,” “influence,” and “development”—without sounding ham-handed and naïve. As graduate students, we learn to master a set of euphemisms that allow us to make the same claims more discreetly: we talk about the “provenance” or “context” of an idea, for instance, rather than its “source” or “origin.” “Causes” can always be reframed as modes of “mediation.” My point is not that these words are jargon: they have perfectly valid uses. A “provenance” and a “source” are actually two different things, and the choice between the terms is significant. But in literary studies, it is hard to make that choice on purely intellectual grounds. Using language that foregrounds continuity (“source,” “influence,” or what have you) always risks a loss of disciplinary authority; to use Foucauldian terms, the inquiry risks appearing merely “genetic” instead of properly “genealogical.” In literary scholarship, moreover, the concepts of historical continuity and fragmentation have become charged with a strange moral feeling. This is strange, first of all, because the distinction is rhetorical and tactical rather than substantive: in reality, contrast and continuity are inextricably fused dimensions of social change. But the moralization of this issue is also strange because literary scholars often misrecognize their discipline’s time-honored preference for a rhetoric of discontinuity as being somehow subversive. This irony became particularly evident in debates about postmodernity. Whether they were attacking or defending postmodernism, critics tended to begin from the assumption that the concept of historical continuity was by definition regressive. Defenders of postmodernism would therefore celebrate its critique of master narratives, while skeptics replied that postmodern fragmentation was merely a cover for a nostalgic reinscription of continuity. A pair of articles about Toni Morrison’s Beloved will serve as one typical instance of the pattern. On the one hand, Kimberly Chabot Davis celebrated the novel’s discontinuity, claiming that it displayed a “postmodernist suspicion of coherent and logical historical narratives that attempt to smooth over the disorder of lived experience.”9 On the other hand, Walter Benn Michaels argued that Beloved actually struggles to reconstruct a stable cultural identity, using ghosts and

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memories in an effort to prove historical continuity. “Continuity,” Michaels explains, “is turned into identity.”10 Both sides of this argument took it as granted that continuous historical narrative had a recuperative function, although they disagreed about whether Beloved did or did not give in to that stabilizing temptation. Neither side considered the possibility that “fragmentation” might itself be a recuperative strategy, affirming cultural identity just as effectively in its own paradoxical way. But this has in fact been the central strategy of English-language literary cultivation since , when F. D. Maurice argued that the purpose of instruction in English was to give the middle classes a sense of heritage by bringing them into direct confrontation with a remote, apparently alien fragment of their own past. From Paterian appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of vanished eras, through T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition” (paradoxically transformed at once and as a whole by each new “Individual Talent”), to postmodern critiques of “continuous history,” literary study has consistently located cultural prestige in moments of rupture rather than gradual and continuous change. I’m offering this as a social generalization about the workings of prestige in the discipline. I don’t mean to imply that literary scholars have lacked any intellectual resources for thinking about continuity. On the contrary, early-twentieth-century scholars influenced by the history of ideas tried to smooth the transitions between periods by tracing the combination and recombination of “unit ideas.” More modestly and more usefully, Raymond Williams stressed that every cultural moment is a palimpsest of overlapping impulses, some of which are emergent, some dominant, and some only residual.11 As I stressed in Chapter , our discipline has had a bewilderingly creative history, where very little goes unsaid. Our blind spots are not typically produced by absolute suppression of perspective B; they’re produced because structural forces in the discipline make it easy to keep returning to perspective A. So, for instance, A. O. Lovejoy’s history of ideas was in the end displaced by René Wellek’s mode of literary history, which reaffirmed cultural periods as discrete entities. And while Raymond Williams’s efforts to trace gradual transformations of ideology have been celebrated, his reputation has never been strong enough to prevent literary scholars from returning to Michel Foucault’s view that “continuous history is the correlate of consciousness,” a refuge for “the sovereign subject” that needs to be disrupted and critiqued.12 Literary scholars’ enduring preference for contrast over continuity has several different motivations. Earlier chapters of this book have traced the

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history of that preference from its nineteenth-century origins, arguing that it is bound up with cultural distinction and with a rationale for disciplinary autonomy. But it is also, among other things, a pragmatic response to inherent limitations of our subject. One of the primary ways other historians trace continuity is to reason about chains of causality. This is always going to be difficult in literary history, since the primary causes of historical change are not usually literary. When a literary historian tries to explain large-scale change, their explanation is likely to become less literary in proportion as it becomes more minutely causal. Confronted with this dilemma, literary scholars often find it simpler to fall back on contrasted case studies. In fact, where this book leaps over long stretches of time, I have solved the problem that way myself. There are alternate ways to trace continuity that don’t insist on causality, but those methods tend to require a proliferation of examples that has until recently been difficult to manage. (This is where digital methods become essential, and I will return in a moment to the contribution they are making.) Thus the waning of contemporary interest in periods and movements presents literary scholars with a uniquely acute dilemma. Historians are well positioned to remind their readers that the distinction between “continuity” and “contrast” is rhetorical—a choice of perspectives rather than a difference of kind. But literary scholarship has tended to invest that same distinction with cultural significance and moral drama. It isn’t something we can easily discard. In fact, it can be difficult to imagine what literary history would look like if its significance weren’t articulated as a series of fateful turns and movements and interventions. The weight of this disciplinary inheritance can be felt even where recent scholarship has tried to reimagine literary history most adventurously. Recent experiments with quantification, for instance, could in principle allow scholars to represent change as a continuous trend, instead of arguing about causality, or juxtaposing contrasted examples. But it is far from clear that scholars are ready to embrace this possibility. Quantification is controversial in the humanities for a host of reasons, of course, and the premise of historical continuity may not seem high on the list of its sins. The more familiar objections involve a charge of scientism. But I would argue that many complaints about scientism boil down in practice to a suspicion that quantification will dissolve the kinds of discontinuity that serve as containers for the cultural value of history.

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Solicitude about such containers is perhaps most often expressed as a fear that digital approaches will erode the integrity of individual books and authors, chewing up volumes and reducing them to flows of data. But this is only the simplest version of a concern that can also be expressed in more general ways. Writing about oral tradition, Maureen McLane is not preoccupied by the autonomy of discrete aesthetic artefacts, but she does remain troubled by a suspicion that distant reading might dissolve the “units of analysis” that make literature culturally meaningful. [H]ow would one even begin to identify the “unit of analysis” that would diagnostically and comparatively cut across world-historical genres, like the novel? It was a close, not (only) a distant, reader, who identified free-indirect style; a close, not (only) a distant, reader, who specified the formal features of the ballad. . . .13

McLane is particularly concerned to defend close reading, so the “units of analysis” she offers as examples are genres, and their historicizable formal features. But other critics of quantitative historicism have foregrounded other “units of analysis.” In her response to Franco Moretti in Critical Inquiry, Katie Trumpener suggests that a quantitative approach may be blind to national as well as chronological boundaries: Moretti is interested here in the history of British book titles during one stretch of British literary history and has worked to acquire a systematic knowledge of them. But his findings may not be readily generalizable for other stretches of literary history, not even in neighboring and closely interconnected literary cultures.14

This objection could actually apply to any critical study, since no study can pretend to encompass all nations and all “stretches of literary history.” But when literary scholars are responding to a study that uses quantitative methods, they tend to invoke boundaries as if their existence constituted a critique of quantitative historicism in particular. The response suggests that what literary scholars have found fundamentally troubling about quantification is its potential to dissolve the boundaries of culturally significant entities—whether the entities in question are genres, or periods, or national cultures. Indeed, Moretti seems to anticipate this critique in Graphs, Maps, Trees, where he is at pains to point out that graphs acquire meaning only when divided into discrete segments by a human interpreter. “Quantitative data can tell us

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when Britain produced one new novel per month, or week, or day, or hour for that matter, but where the significant turning points lie along the continuum— and why—is something that must be decided on a different basis.”15 The general observation that data require interpretation is unassailable. But that general observation becomes fused here with a more specific assumption that graphs need to be interpreted by locating certain “turning points” that divide them into significant segments or phases. The rest of Moretti’s chapter on “Graphs” pursues this segmented approach very successfully, identifying different stages in the rise of the novel and characterizing genres as discrete “cycles” that can be picked out of the apparently smooth curve of publication statistics. The chapter has already become a contemporary classic—indicating, I think, that Moretti chose the right approach for his audience. Humanists do prefer graphs once they are divided into discrete phases and cycles. But that isn’t the only way to interpret graphs. It is easy to envision a graph with no significant turning points at all—a line or curve that ascends or descends smoothly from one edge of the page to the other. A graph of that form could be highly meaningful. But Moretti was canny not to try to persuade humanists with that sort of example. Quantitative methods will be easier for us to assimilate when they conform to our preference for discontinuity—a fit that is entirely possible to achieve when the object of study is a periodizable subgenre like the epistolary novel. But “distant reading” does also have the potential to trouble literary historicism more profoundly, because quantification can make it possible to describe change without articulating it as a series of discrete phases at all. This presents literary scholars with a genuine opportunity, but one that may be difficult to seize. Let me illustrate with a bit of evidence I recently discovered myself. I’m fairly certain this finding could matter for literary scholars: it reveals that a specialized literary diction emerged in the nineteenth century. But in trying to articulate the significance of this graph, I have found that I have to work against the grain of narrative patterns that ordinarily make significance legible in my discipline. This graph (see Fig. ) is based on a collection of , English-language volumes that Jordan Sellers and I assembled, covering the period from  to . Volumes were drawn from several different sources, including TCPECCO and the Brown Women Writers Project; Sellers also selected many volumes by hand. For readers interested in the details, most of our collection is available online, through the Journal of Digital Humanities.16

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Occurrences of words that entered English before 1150, divided by occurrences of those that entered 1150–1699, in three genres

2.5

Genre Poetry Prose fiction Nonfiction

2.0

1.5

1.0

1750

1800

1850

Fig. 3. The differentiation of diction in three genres, 1700–1899.

The individual data points plotted on the graph reflect yearly ratios between two lists of words: those that entered the English language before , and those that entered the language between  and . We excluded proper nouns, abbreviations, determiners, prepositions, and pronouns. We also excluded words that were coined after , because we were not interested in charting lexical innovation as such. Our interest in etymology was based instead on the sociolinguistic observation that the older part of the English lexicon tends to be used more heavily in less formal contexts. Old English words are used more commonly in speech, for instance—whereas words of French and Latin provenance are common in writing, and especially formal writing.17 We wondered whether we could use this fact to reveal broad changes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diction. We chose to divide the lexicon at  instead of  because the real watershed that gives English etymology social significance is less the Norman Invasion itself than the subsequent two hundred years—a period when English was almost exclusively spoken.

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Words that survived this period had to be used in speech; those borrowed after it were often borrowed to flesh out a literate vocabulary that had become impoverished. For this historical reason, we expected that etymology would reveal shifting levels of formality, or what linguists call the social “register” of writing. What we didn’t expect to discover was that these changes would affect different genres so differently. In nonfiction prose, for instance, the older part of the lexicon becomes relatively less common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whereas in poetry it becomes more common. One might infer that poetry was becoming less formal, or more like the spoken language. But specific conclusions about individual genres are less striking here than the broader pattern of differentiation. By the end of the nineteenth century there’s a gulf between diction in different genres that had not previously existed. Moreover, this appears to be a broad differentiation between literary and non-literary diction, because fiction and drama change in ways that closely parallel poetry. (I haven’t included drama in this illustration, because it’s difficult to make four different sets of points legible in a black-and-white graph. But drama has a trajectory very similar to the trajectory of fiction.) A new gulf opens up in this period between all three “literary” genres and nonfiction prose. This kind of evidence allows us to trace a new, distinctively literary diction, which emerges along with the modern concept of literature as a category of writing set apart by fictive and aesthetic aims. That is clearly a result with literary-historical significance. But I have found it hard to articulate the importance of a finding like this without falling back on a rhetoric of decisive turning points and interventions that tends to distort the evidence. For instance, when I try to describe this research to colleagues, I am often asked what it tells us about romanticism. In a way this is a logical question: just eyeballing the graph, it does appear that several trend lines bend in the late eighteenth century. And there would be plausible ways to turn this into a story about romanticism. For instance, you could observe that evidence of a growing differentiation between poetry and prose ought to complicate our reception of William Wordsworth’s claim that he was resisting “those who by their reasonings have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition.”18 After Wordsworth, poetic language did become more accessible, and perhaps even more like speech, but that is not to say that it became less specialized. Personification of abstract ideas may

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have declined, but in some broader ways “the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition” increased very markedly in the nineteenth century. I find those quotations from Wordsworth do effectively dramatize this result for an audience of literary scholars. And yet there’s something specious about the rhetorical strategy that would make a two-century trend comprehensible by linking it to a famous intervention by a single author. Even the term “romanticism” is inadequate here. The truth is that the space of separation between poetry and nonfiction prose widens steadily, in our collection, from  to . It widens more rapidly in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth, but there’s no reason to assume that the new pace of change—which is sustained throughout the nineteenth century—was a consequence of “romanticism,” or of anything that happened specifically around the year . In fact, when Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac observed loosely similar trends in the language of nineteenth-century fiction, they associated those trends with “a fundamental shift in narration from telling to showing” that we tend to associate with Victorian realist novels rather than romantic poetry.19 Instead of ascribing a causal role to literary movements like “romanticism” or genres like “the realist novel,” it might be better to say that those genres and movements were themselves participating in broader discursive trends. Trends of this kind play out on a scale that literary scholars aren’t accustomed to describing, and it may take decades for us to figure out how to describe them. As a first stab at the problem, I have hinted that the linguistic changes traced above may have been linked to the emergence of literature as a specifically aesthetic category. Elsewhere, I have used text-mining methods to argue at more length that the specialization of literary diction was related to a growing tendency to identify literature with subjective experience—a trend that I see as bound up with nineteenth-century notions of aesthetic cultivation.20 That argument may be right or wrong; I will not pursue it at length here. In the present context, I’m interested in making a broader meta-argument about the difficulty of grappling with this sort of evidence. In principle, literary scholars should be able to move back and forth between different kinds of historical argument, invoking continuity or contrast as necessary for a particular thesis. But in practice, we find it very difficult to make arguments about continuous, gradual change. It runs against the grain of many disciplinary preferences.

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Many literary scholars are simply wary of the quantitative analysis that is required to make trends on this scale visible. But that wariness, I have argued, is itself partly a consequence of our disciplinary investment in discontinuity. In other words, the problem with quantitative arguments is that they tend to produce generalizations of a fluid kind that resist translation into the familiar entities of literary-historical argument (a literary movement, an emblematic author, a cultural turn). If you want the significance of your research to be recognized, this sort of methodological novelty is not helpful. So scholars pursuing quantitative research into literary history have a strong incentive to frame arguments as if they did have a more conventional payoff—as if digital methods could help us identify “influential authors” or “cultural turning points.” I think this is one of the most significant pitfalls confronting digital scholarship in our discipline: the assumption that quantitative methods need to prove their value by answering the kinds of questions a more traditional interpretive agenda would have posed. Recent moves toward “distant” or “quantitative” reading can provide a healthy methodological diversification for literary studies—a counterweight to our long-established preference for case studies and contrast. But in order for that diversification to work, we need to let quantitative methods do what they do best: map broad patterns and trace gradients of change. That is harder than it sounds, because literary scholars are not trained to appreciate gradients. Results of that kind can look like a scientistic intrusion into our discipline: it’s easy to feel that the results would be better and more humanistic if only they were less abstract, less impersonal, less continuous. For instance, scholars often suggest that quantitative methods would be more appropriately humanistic if they were applied on a smaller scale, or if they did more to illuminate the subtle differences between individual works.21 I hope it is clear that I have nothing against close reading: there is a fair amount of it in this volume. But I think it is a mistake to expect new methods to solve old problems. There is no technical reason why quantitative methods cannot be applied to individual works. But human readers are already very good at interpreting writing at that scale, and it may be a long time before computers add much to our achievements. On the other hand, we find it difficult to reason about continuous gradients of change involving thousands of volumes. In that domain, we are probably overlooking important patterns because they happen to be invisible on the scale of reading we ordinarily inhabit. To appreciate those patterns as significant contributions to literary history, we

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will need to overcome skepticism not just about quantitative evidence, but about historical continuity as such. The shift I’m describing would entail a diversification of literary study, introducing new methods and new disciplinary projects, but it needn’t compel us to abandon any aspect of the present curriculum. Certainly I don’t mean to suggest that we abandon period boundaries themselves. I have traced the history of periodization in order to show that it is an institution deeply rooted in literary scholars’ conception of their own social role. But to trace the social history of an idea is not necessarily to critique the idea itself. Exposing students to historical difference may not be the only purpose of literary study, but it remains an important purpose, and as long as we intend to dramatize historical difference, some system of chronological boundaries will remain inevitable. Periodization may perhaps become less central to the social organization of the discipline, but I see no reason to imagine that literature departments will stop teaching period surveys. Reframing the relation between contrast and continuity in literary studies would, however, have institutional consequences. René Wellek may have been right to feel that periodization kept literary history distinct from other disciplines. Critical description of individual works, authors, and periods is a task that literary scholars can have mostly to themselves, because few other disciplines attempt it. But as we expand the discipline to include questions about gradual change, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw clear disciplinary boundaries. Many disciplines are interested in social behavior, or processes of change, or ways of discerning patterns in large collections of data. It has already become difficult to separate literary scholarship from linguistics, history, and sociology. It now appears that the discipline could overlap in places with computer science. In other words, the consequence of reframing literary historicism more broadly might not be that “periods” disappear, but that literary history becomes ever more permeable to other disciplines. Although deans often praise interdisciplinarity, it is far from uncontroversial among professors. Over the last decade, several literary scholars have cast a skeptical eye at the very idea of interdisciplinarity. 22 The boundary between literature and science, especially, is fraught: even some scholars who identify as digital humanists are concerned that it might be crossed too easily or in the wrong ways. In “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,” Johanna Drucker suggests that humanists who borrow

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computational methods are liable to get the worse half of the bargain, since “computational environments” are designed on the assumption that “objects of knowledge can be understood as self-identical, self-evident, ahistorical, and autonomous.” The premise of a fundamental epistemological divide between the sciences and the humanities is so widely shared that writers rarely feel a need to articulate it as clearly as Drucker. More commonly, epithets like “scientistic” posit some boundary as normative without pausing to define it. But it’s not clear that even Drucker has produced a persuasive account of the norms involved here. Computer scientists who spend their whole careers struggling to find patterns in messy data—using statistics, the science of uncertainty—might be taken aback by her claim that their discipline takes objects of knowledge as “self-evident.” For that matter, Marxist and materialist critics might be surprised by her tendency to identify “the humanities” with perspectivalism: “humanistic expression is always observer dependent.”23 Arguments of this kind don’t separate the humanities from the sciences so much as they separate a particular kind of humanistic argument (organized contrastively by individual cases) from a kind of argument that discusses trends and aggregates. I don’t mean to criticize Drucker in particular: her essay is unusual only in its conscientious effort to articulate widely-shared assumptions. I think the mistake here is collective: we assume we have—but don’t actually have— any consensus account of the difference between scientific and humanistic learning. Perhaps one will emerge. But lacking such an account, I am strongly tempted to infer that the difference is mostly social. Of course there are methodological differences between disciplines: textual interpretation is more important in literary study, for instance, than in history or psychology. But our habit of grouping disciplines into “humanities,” “natural sciences,” and “social sciences” seems to me contingent. (It is certainly a recent development: “the humanities” united a looser federation of “arts and letters” and opposed them clearly to “social science” only in the twentieth century.) I think this system of organization is supported less by inherent differences of subject matter than by assumptions about the social purpose of different fields. The sciences are expected to explain the world, and to provide instrumental knowledge for manipulating it. The humanities have been expected instead to provide cultivation—which means, among other things, that they claim to give students a way of internalizing the collective past.

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In the humanities, accusations of scientism are thus often expressions of concern that a particular project may undermine the cultural rationale for humanistic study. In the s and s, that was explicitly what critics meant when they rejected continuous literary history as “scientistic”: they were concerned that the cultivating mission of the discipline was being forgotten in a quest for mere factual knowledge. We invoke the cultivating mission of literary history less openly these days—perhaps because, after reading John Guillory’s Cultural Capital, we are no longer very certain what that mission would be.24 But it is clear, at any rate, that accusations of scientism posit a goal for the humanities that is fundamentally distinct from the goals of other disciplines—a goal that even needs to be protected from close contact with their methods. To put this another way, literary study has developed a deep preoccupation with its own disciplinary autonomy. To refute a proposal, it is sometimes sufficient to say that it would subordinate literature to the methods of another discipline. This habit of argument was already strongly developed in the early twentieth century; contemporary questions about enrollment and funding only add to its urgency. But this is a situation that most readers probably already recognize: I think I have reached the limit of what I can add to this topic impartially and descriptively. Personally, I believe a preoccupation with disciplinary autonomy is hindering rather than helping literary scholarship. A defensive and selfenclosing strategy might not be the best way to promote a discipline even if its identity were really in peril. And in practice, I suspect the danger of blurring our disciplinary identity is often exaggerated by slippery-slope assumptions. For instance, René Wellek was probably right that a strongly periodized approach to literature served to separate literature from social history. In recent years the weakening of periodization has accompanied a weakening of the boundary between those disciplines, and we are now well beyond the perilous situation he described, where “topics like ‘Women as Healers in Mediaeval Life and Literature’ are being accepted by the foremost American universities for the doctorate in English.” But this confusion of disciplines has not necessarily had the consequence he projected—that “all distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.”25 Instead, English departments seem capable of integrating the contributions of other disciplines (from women’s studies to

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psychology to information science), while still finding literature valuable in its own right. It is true that in the process something has been lost. Toward the end of the twentieth century, literature departments quietly stopped claiming to provide a generalized culture distinct from mere learning. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it may be hard to say whether the discipline jumped off that cliff or was pushed. In any case, something was sacrificed, and I suspect the memory of that sacrifice is largely responsible for the intensity of our contemporary preoccupation with disciplinary identity. Literary critics seem to feel that we have just given away a great deal of cultural capital, and can’t afford to lose more! But—again, speaking personally—I don’t believe our discipline needs to be defended as culture. It can be defended perfectly well as a form of learning congruent to the intellectual projects of other disciplines. Moreover, it seems to me a form of learning that has excelled especially in roving beyond its own boundaries. Literary scholars do have special areas of expertise in language and literary form, but our tradition is impressive above all because of its synthetic and eclectic character. Literary scholars have been brilliant improvisers, pulling together Marx and Freud, Saussure and Arendt, to explain complex intersections between language, psychology, and historical change. I would suggest that the educational mission of our discipline is not distinctively cultural, but fundamentally similar to the mission of other disciplines: to teach students to appreciate complexity, challenge their own assumptions, and thoughtfully weigh different kinds of evidence. To be sure, the complexity we grapple with will usually be figurative, linguistic, and historical. Quantitative methods will play a small role, limited mainly to macroscopic questions where it would otherwise be difficult to get a clear view of the subject. But this doesn’t mean that quantitative methods need to be strictly regulated, lest they infect the discipline with an alien scientism. On the contrary, I would argue that they provide a much-needed methodological diversity, allowing us to take a fresh look at the tension between continuity and contrast, which our discipline has often treated in a one-sided way. Departments of literature feel beleaguered at the moment, and I think it is true that our familiar stock-in-trade (while still valuable) no longer confers the same prestige it once did. But this is also a moment of enormous potential for literary study, if we’re willing to embrace new challenges. There is certainly a gulf between the gradualist models of change that often prevail in the social

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and natural sciences, and familiar, contrastive modes of literary history that seek to define the unique character of a work, author, or period. But we can make it our job to bridge that gulf. Someone has to teach students how to understand discourse in a way that combines different methods and scales of analysis: it might as well be us.

Notes

Introduction . Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . William Morton Payne, ed., English in American Universities (Boston: D. C. Heath, ), –, . . For historicism and antiquity, see Salvatore Settis, The Future of the Classical, trans. A. Cameron (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, ). For theories of “uneven development,” see James Chandler, England in  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. . John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, ), . . William Wordsworth, The Prelude: , , , ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, ), –. . For these motifs in Tolstoy, see Ted Underwood, “Historical Difference as Immortality in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel.” Modern Language Quarterly  (): –. . See especially Emma Willard, A System of Universal History, in Perspective (Hartford: F. J. Huntington, ). . Frederick Denison Maurice, Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, ), . . See, for instance, Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, ). . Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages 177

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to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ), –. . Thomas Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, th ed.,  vols. (London, ), : . . For transformations of “tradition” in the romantic era, see James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. . Keats, Poems of John Keats, . . Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, ), . . William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. . James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill, intro. Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . . Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, vol.  of Works,  vols. (London, ), . . Ted Underwood, “If Romantic Historicism Shaped Modern Fundamentalism, Would That Count as Secularization?,” European Romantic Review . (): –. . Reuben Post Halleck, History of English Literature (New York: American Book Company, ), . . Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” in Essential Works,  vols., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), : . See also Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works, : –. . Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .

Chapter 1 . Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, ed. George Gibian (New York: Norton, ), . . Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, ), . . Nicola Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Others (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), xix–xx. . Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . . Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), , . For the background of this debate, see also Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). . Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), . . Edward Coke, The Compleat Copy-Holder (London: ), –, .

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. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), –. See also Raymond Williams’s reflections on history-as-process in “History,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. . Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , –. . As Ruth Mack has argued, the reification of historicity in objects has a longer history in the eighteenth-century novel. See Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), –. . Birgitta Berglund, Woman’s Whole Existence: The House as an Image in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen, Lund Studies in English , ed. Sven Bäckman and Jan Svartvik (Lund: Lund University Press, ) – . . Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (, rpt. Poole: Woodstock Books, ), : . . Marilyn Butler, “The Woman at the Window: Ann Radcliffe in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen,” in Gender and Literary Voice, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes and Meier, ), –. . Radcliffe, Sicilian Romance, : . . Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, ed. Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , . . Ibid., . . James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill, intro. Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . For Macpherson’s historicism, see also Ted Underwood, “Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife,” PMLA  (): –. . Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, , . . Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, , . . Ibid., . . Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest, , –, –. . Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), . . Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . . Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, , , . . Susan Hegeman has argued that the descriptive/anthropological and nor-

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mative/literary senses of “culture” in fact remain intertwined even in the twentieth centuy. See Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. . Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. . As Barry Sloane points out, Morgan’s Irish nationalism aims to ameliorate, rather than end, colonial subjection. [Barry Sloan, The Pioneers of Anglo-Irish Fiction, – (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, ), –.] Joep Leersen has amplified this observation by stressing that Morgan’s national tales represent Ireland for, and largely from the perspective of, English outsiders. [Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), .] Mary Jean Corbett, on the other hand, has emphasized the novel’s power to re-educate English readers. [Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.] . Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (London: Pickering and Chatto, ), , . . Ibid., , –. . Ibid., n. . Ibid., . . Ibid., , –. . For the “patriotic” background to this assumption, see Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, –. . Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, , . . Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, Florence Macarthy,  vols. (London: Henry Colburn, ), : , . For the “relative autonomy” of the cultural field, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. . Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, O’Donnel, a national tale,  vols. (London: H. Colburn, ), : xi–xii. . Sloane, Pioneers of Anglo-Irish Fiction, . . Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho, . . Owenson, O’Donnel, : . . Ibid., : . . Corbett, Allegories of Union, –. . Owenson, O’Donnel, : –. . The figurative strategy here loosely resembles the mode of “nostalgia” that Nicholas Dames has traced in Jane Austen: the continuity of O’Donnel’s memories is suppressed in order to reduce his past to a set of moments that acquire an implicitly collective character. Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. . “I agree with you that Lady Morgan has fairly hit upon her forte—for O’Donnell [sic] is incomparably superior to the Wild Irish Girl—having nature and reality for its foundation.” Sir Walter Scott, Letters,  vols., ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, ), : . . The tendency to separate the works of Morgan and Scott into different genres persists even in recent studies of the connection between them. Although her groundbreaking account complicates the genealogy of historical fiction, Katie Trumpener does tend to treat Morgan as a writer of national tales, and Scott as a historical novelist (Bardic Nationalism, –). Similarly, although Ina Ferris emphasizes the connections between Morgan’s work and Scott’s, she sees them divided by fundamentally different representations of time (Ferris, Romantic National Tale, ). . Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, ), . . Shaw distinguishes Guy Mannering from other historical novels by emphasizing that it uses the past mainly (and more than usual for Scott) as a pastoral canvas on which to project present-day concerns. Harry Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), , –. . For the social significance of “romance” in Scott, and particularly in Guy Mannering, see Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Jane Millgate compares the plots of The Antiquary and Guy Mannering in Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –. . Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, – (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. . For connections between Guy Mannering and colonialism, see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, –. For the influence of the Napoleonic wars on Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, see Shaw, Forms of Historical Fiction, –. . Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New York: Atheneum, ), , –. For an important extension and qualification of this argument, see Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. . Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, , . . Yoon Sun Lee, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . . Shawn Malley, “Walter Scott’s Romantic Archaeology: New/Old Abbotsford and The Antiquary,” Studies in Romanticism . (): –. . Chrystal Croftangry’s estate becomes a meaningful embodiment of tradition only after he loses it and reads about it in the pages of an old document. When he is given a chance to recover part of the estate, he sets up instead as an antiquarian writer. I would like to thank Anne Frey for directing my attention to this episode. Walter

182 Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate, ed. Claire Lamont (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –, –. . Duncan, Modern Romance, . . Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed. P. D. Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), , . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . Ibid., , . . For the history of déjà vu, see Peter Krapp, Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis University Press, ). . Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), . . Scott, Guy Mannering, . . Owenson, Florence Macarthy, : . . Harry Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), . . Scott, Guy Mannering, . . For the history of Scott’s relationship to Williamina Forbes, and her presence in The Antiquary, see A. N. Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. . Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), , . . See Lee, Nationalism and Irony, –. I part company here from Joan S. Elbers, “Isolation and Community in The Antiquary,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction  (): –. Elbers sees Lovel as a synthesis of his symbolic father (Aldobrand Oldbuck) and his biological father (the Catholic Earl of Glenallan). This is an odd claim, since Lovel’s character in fact has nothing in common with the earl’s. Elbers rightly senses that The Antiquary is torn between two ideals that divided public allegiance in the s: a Whiggish individualism and a Burkean reverence for tradition. But revisiting those principles some twenty years later, The Antiquary is in a position to do something more pointed than compromise between them.

Chapter 2 . Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools (New York: Routledge, ), , . . Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. . Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. . Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” Futures Past: On the Seman-

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183

tics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. . Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History, and General Policy, To Which is Prefixed, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life,  vols. (Philadelphia: P. Byrne, ), : . . Ibid., : . . Ibid., : . . Ibid., : . . Daniel Rosenberg, “Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture  (): –, , . . Joseph Priestley, A Description of a New Chart of History (London: J. Johnson, ), , . . John Bigland, Letters on the Study and Use of Ancient and Modern History (Philadelphia: ), iii–iv, . . Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Dialogue in the Shades,” in The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin,  vols. (London: Longman, ), : , . . Hester Lynch Piozzi, Retrospection: or, a Review of the Most Striking and Important Events, Characters, and Situations, and their Consequences, which the Last Eighteen Hundred Years have Presented to the View of Mankind,  vols. (London: John Stockdale, ), vii. . William Howitt and Mary Howitt, “A Hymn of the Night,” in The Desolation of Eyam; The Emigrant, A Tale of the American Woods; and Other Poems (London: Wightman and Cramp, ), , –. . Felicia Hemans, “The Treasures of the Deep,” in Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough: Broadview, ), –. . Victor Hugo, “La pente de la rêverie,” in Les feuilles d’automne (Paris: Renduel, ), –. . John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stil­ linger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), –. . Thomas Burnet, A Treatise Concerning the State of Departed Souls, trans. J. Dennis (London: ), . . Denis Diderot and Étienne Maurice Falconet, Le pour et le contre, correspondance polemique sur la respect de la posterité, Pline, et les anciens auteurs qui ont parlé de peinture et de sculpture (Paris: Éditeurs français réunis, ), , –. My translation. . Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), : –. . James Macpherson, “The War of Caros,” in The Poems of Ossian, and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . . William Hazlitt, “On Different Sorts of Fame,” in The Round Table (Edinburgh: Constable, ), . . Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Sämtliche Werke, vol.  (Munich: Hanser, ), .

184 Notes to Chapter 2

. Felicia Hemans, “The Voice of the Wind,” in Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, ), . . Ibid. . Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). . Felicia Hemans, “Communings with Thought,” in Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Gary Kelly (Peterborough: Broadview, ), –. . Henry St. John, lord viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (London: ), . . John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” in Poems of John Keats, . . My attention to Keats’s alienation from, and transformation of, cultural prestige is indebted to Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ). . R. Johnson, An Introduction to the Study of History (London: ), . . “Observations on the Study of History,” in Janus; or, the Edinburgh Literary Almanack (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, ), . . James Shergold Boone, An Essay on the Study of Modern History (London: John Warren, ), –. . “More Surnames,” in The Spirit of the Public Journals, for the Year  (London: Sherwood, Jones, and Co., ), . The metaphor is directly echoed in a number of later-nineteenth-century works—for example, Thomas Lewin, Fasti Sacri; or a Key to the Chronology of the New Testament (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., ), iii: “Chronology in history is what perspective is in painting.” . Emma Willard, A System of Universal History, in Perspective (Hartford, CT: F. J. Huntington, ), iii. . Ibid., iv. . Emma Willard, History of the United States, or Republic of America (Philadelphia: A. S. Barnes, ), iv. . Ibid., v. . Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Andrew Hook (London: Penguin, ), . . Thomas Babington Macaulay, “On Mitford’s History of Greece,” in Miscellaneous Writings,  vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, ), : , . The article first appeared in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, November . . Ibid., : , , . . Ibid., : , . . Ibid., : –. . Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” in Miscellaneous Writings,  vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, ), : –. First appeared in the Edinburgh Review, May . . Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of “Culture,” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –.

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. “A Proclamation,” Punch  (January , ): . This article is discussed in David Skilton, “Contemplating the Ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and Others,” in Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London . (), http: //www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march/index.html.

Chapter 3 . Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Robert Crawford, ed. The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Jo McMurtry, English Language, English Literature: The Creation of an Academic Discipline (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, ). Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, – (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). Viswanathan’s book has convinced many readers that the discipline of English literature developed first in a colonial context. That would be an appealing thesis, but for practical purposes the developments in England and India seem close to simultaneous (the s are a crucial decade in both contexts). . Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . Court, Institutionalizing English Literature, –, . . Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,  vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, ), : –, : . Vicesimus Knox, ed., Elegant Extracts, or Useful and Entertaining Passages in Prose,  vols. (London: C. Dilly, ). . Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England – (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . . John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta; or, the Diversions of Purley,  vols., nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, , ), : , –, . . Aarsleff, Study of Language in England, . . Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, : . . Ibid., : . . Ibid., : . Thomas Paine, quoted in Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . . Walter Whiter, Etymologicon Universale; or Universal Etymological Dictionary,  vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, –). . James C. McCusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. . John Trusler, The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous, in the English Language; and, the Proper Choice of them Determined,  vols. (London: ), . . “English Synonymes Discriminated,” Quarterly Review  (): –. . William Taylor, English Synonyms Discriminated (London: W. Pople, ), . . Ibid., xix.

186 Notes to Chapter 3

. Ibid., . . Statement by the Council of the University of London, Explanatory of the Nature and Objects of the Institution (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, ), , . . Thomas Dale, “Senior Class; English Philology and Rhetoric,” King’s College Calendar –, King’s College Archives, London, –. . Thomas Dale, “Junior Class; English Language,” King’s College Calendar – , King’s College Archives, London, . . Thomas Dale, “English Literature: Senior and Junior Classes,” King’s College Calendar –, King’s College Archives, London, . See also Thomas Dale, “A Brief Analysis of Early English Literature for the Use of Students in the Class of English Philology and Rhetoric,” King’s College Calendar –, King’s College Archives, London, –. . Thomas Dale, “Principles and Practice of English Composition: Junior Class,” King’s College Calendar –, King’s College Archives, London, . . Taylor, English Synonyms Discriminated, . . Henry Rogers, “Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Structure of the English Language,” Edinburgh Review  (): . . Ibid., . . Henry Rogers, General Introduction to a Series of Lectures on English Grammar and Composition (London: William Ball and Taylor and Walton, ), . . R. G. Latham, An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London, October ,  (London: Taylor and Walton, ), . . Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  vols. (New York: Harper, ), : . . Thomas DeQuincey, “The English Language,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine  (): . . Court, Institutionalizing English Literature, , . . Taylor, English Synonyms Discriminated, . . Alan Bacon, “English Literature Becomes a University Subject: King’s College, London as Pioneer,” Victorian Studies  (): . . Court, Institutionalizing English Literature, . . Frederick Denison Maurice, “Introductory Lecture by the Professor of English Literature and Modern History at King’s College, London,” Educational Magazine, new series,  (): . . Dale, “English Literature,” . . Frederick Denison Maurice, Exam on “English Literature,” King’s College Calendar for –, item , King’s College Archives, London. Frederick Denison Maurice, Exam on “The Tudors,” The Calendar of King’s College, London, for – (London: John W. Parker, ), . . Frederick Denison Maurice, Has the Church, or the State, the Power to Educate the Nation? (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, ), . . Ibid., , .

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. Ibid., , , . . Ibid., –. . Maurice, “Introductory Lecture,” , . . Ibid., . . Augustin Thierry, Lettres sur l’histoire de France (Paris: Tessier, ), . My translation. . Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, ), . My translation. . François Guizot, Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l’empire Romain jusqu’a la révolution Française, th ed. (Paris: Didier, ), –. . Augustin Thierry, Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands, th ed.,  vols. (Paris: Just Tessier, ), : . . Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” in Miscellaneous Writings,  vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, ), : , . . Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, – (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. . Edward S. Creasy, The Spirit of Historical Study: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London, October ,  (London: Taylor and Walton, ), . . Benjamin Heath Malkin, An Introductory Lecture on History, Delivered in the University of London (London: John Taylor, ), . . Robert Vaughan, On the Study of General History, an Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London (London: John Taylor, ), –. . Creasy, Spirit of Historical Study, . . J. A. Cramer, An Inaugural Lecture on the Study of Modern History (Oxford: John Henry Parker, ), . . A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts; or a Parallel Betweeen the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (Salisbury: for the Author, ). . Maurice, Has the Church, . . Ibid., . . Minutes of the Council of King’s College, London, Thursday, October , , College Archives. . F. D. Maurice, “Letter to Miss G. Hare,” May , , in Life,  vols. (New York: Scribner’s, ), : . . Richard W. Schoch, “‘We do Nothing but Enact History’: Thomas Carlyle Stages the Past,” Nineteenth-Century Literature . (): . . Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), . . Creasy, Spirit of Historical Study, , , . . R. G. Latham, “Letter to Henry Malden,” October , , letter # in College Correspondence, University College Archives, London. . The Calendar of King’s College, London, for – (London: John W. Parker,

188 Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

), . The Calendar of King’s College, London, for – (London: John W. Parker, ), . . Charles H. Pearson, “Letter to R. W. Jelf,” June , KA/IC/P in King’s College, London, Council Minutes, College Archives. . “There are certain differences of style in English writing of the reigns of Elizabeth, Anne, and Victoria. Describe and account for them.” Henry Morley, examination, The University College, London, Calendar for the Session – (London: James Walton, ), xxxvii. . The University College, London, Calendar for the Session – (London: Walton and Maberley, ), . . William Morton Payne, ed., English in American Universities (Boston: D. C. Heath, ), –, .

Chapter 4 . Annual Register of the University of Chicago, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . . William Henry Schofield, Chivalry in English Literature: Chaucer, Malory, Spenser and Shakespeare, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). . A seminar in comparative literature was offered by the English Department at the University of California through most of the first two decades of the twentieth century. See, for instance, University of California Register, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), : . . Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett, Comparative Literature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., ), vi, , . . Ibid., . . Alastair Mackenzie, The Evolution of Literature (New York: T. Y. Crowell and Co., ). . Ibid., . . George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), vii. . Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ), xi. . “General Literature,” Annual Register of the University of Chicago, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Harvard University Catalogue, – (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). . Bulletin of the State University of Kentucky, – (Lexington: State University of Kentucky, ).

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. Annual Register of the University of Chicago, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Bulletin of the State University of Kentucky – (Lexington: State University of Kentucky, ), . . University of California Announcement of Courses – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . University of Illinois Annual register, – (Urbana, IL: Published by the University, ), –. . Catalogue of Radcliffe College, – (Cambridge, ), –. . Leland Stanford Junior University Bulletin, – (n.p.: Stanford University Press, ), . . Michael Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: – ,” Criticism  (): –. . California Announcement of Courses, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Announcements: The University of Chicago – (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), . . Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. . John Livingston Lowes, “The Modern Language Association and Humane Scholarship,” PMLA , suppl. (): , quoted ibid., . . Norman Foerster, The American Scholar: A Study in Litterae Inhumaniores (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, ), –, , ix, . . Ibid., . . A. O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA  (): , , . . Robert J. Griffin, “A Critique of Romantic Periodization,” in The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New York: Garland, ), . . René Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History: II.” Comparative Literature  (): . . René Wellek, “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History: I.” Comparative Literature  (): . . Graff, Professing Literature, –. . Mark Parker, “Measure and Countermeasure: The Lovejoy-Wellek Debate and Romantic Periodization,” in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), , –. . René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., ), . . Ibid., –, –. . Ibid., . . René Wellek, “Literary History,” in Literary Scholarship: Its Aims and Methods, ed. Norman Foerster (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), .

190 Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

. See Parker, “Measure and Countermeasure,” ; and Griffin, “Critique of Romantic Periodization,” –. . René Wellek, “The Crisis in Comparative Literature,” in Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), , , . . Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” in Essential Works,  vols., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), –. . Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works, vol. , ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), , –. . Kenneth Surin, “Comparative Literature in America: Attempt at a Genealogy,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (London: Blackwell, ), .

Chapter 5 . Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York, ), –. . Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. . Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, . . Joanna Russ, “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic,” in The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann E. Fleenor (Montréal: Eden Press, ), –, esp. –. . See the eponymous cleaner of graves in Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, ed. Douglas Mack (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), –. . Here I am borrowing Bourdieu’s model of class as a composite category, made up of distinctions articulated and postures adopted within multiple interacting “fields” (for instance, the field of culture, a subset of the larger field of social distinction). See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. . A. S. Byatt, Possession (New York: Possession, ), . . Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton (New York: Grove, ), . . Byatt, Possession, –; Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Faber and Faber, ), . . Ackroyd, Chatterton, . . The most candid explorations of this anxiety have focused specifically on the academy: for instance, Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ). But by articulating the crisis as a conflict between market ideals and the ideal of culture, they imply (I think correctly) that similar conflicts are felt by knowledge workers located outside of educational institutions. . Johann Gottfried Herder, Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and History, trans. Marcia Bunge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .

Notes to Chapter 5

191

. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, ), –. . Readings, The University in Ruins, . . Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, vol.  of Works,  vols. (London, ), x. . Ibid., . . Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), . . John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., ), . Though Stoppard and Byatt also declare common cause with scientists, it is possible to find some parallel-lives stories—such as Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (New York: Harper, )—that employ an older strategy of pressing science into service as historicist culture’s Other. . Fowles, French Lieutenant’s Woman, , . . Stoppard, Arcadia, . . For analogous gestures in recent historiography, see Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Imperfect Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. . David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), , –, . Simpson is quoting Stephen Green­ blatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . . Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Culture (New York: Fawcett, ), –. . John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), . . Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, . . For the broader history of this project, see Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations  (Winter ): –. . Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora, English-language ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol.  of  (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . . Werner Sollors, quoted in Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Mealley, introduction to History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Mealley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . See also Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory,” –. . I have translated this passage from the French, because none of the existing translations do full justice to the funereal overtones of the original text. Pierre Nora, “Entre Mémoire et Histoire: La problématique des lieux,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol.  (Paris: Gallimard, ), , xxiv. . Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, ), .

192 Notes to Chapters 5 and 6

. Nora, “General Introduction,” , , . . Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory,” n. Klein credits this insight to David A. Bell, “Realms of Memory,” New Republic, September , , –. . Walter Benn Michaels, “‘You Who Never Was There’: Slavery and the New Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust,” Narrative . (): . Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. . Jameson, Postmodernism, , , ix. . Ibid., . Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, ), –. . Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), –. . Ibid., . . Jameson, Postmodernism, . . Sally Shuttleworth, “Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel,” in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor Shaffer (Berlin: De Gruyter, ), . For an allied argument, see Dana Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel,” Studies in the Novel . (Winter ): –. . T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ), . . David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . . Jameson, Postmodernism, , xi. . Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, ), xii. . John Horgan, The End of Science (New York: Addison-Wesley, ), . . P. B. Shelley, “Preface to Peter Bell the Third,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. D. H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, ), . . Kwame Anthony Appiah, “What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?” Washington Post, September , . . Ackroyd, Chatterton, .

Chapter 6 . I am caricaturing Marjorie Levinson’s justly celebrated reading of “Tintern Abbey” in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . James Chandler, England in : The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ). . It was incidentally excellent advice, for which I have always been grateful to Walter Cohen.

Notes to Chapter 6

193

. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, ). . Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Riverhead, ). . William Galperin and Susan Wolfson, “The Romantic Century,” in Romantic Circles, , http: //www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/crisis/crisisa.html. . Jerome McGann, “Who’s Carving Up the Nineteenth Century,” PMLA . (): –. Charles J. Rzepka, “The Feel of Not to Feel It,” PMLA . (): – . Susan J. Wolfson, “Our Puny Boundaries: Why the Craving for Carving Up the Nineteenth Century?” PMLA . (): –. . See, for instance, the introduction to a special issue on periodization: Marshall Brown, “Periods and Resistances,” MLQ . (): –. . Kimberly Chabot Davis, “‘Postmodern Blackness’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the End of History,” Twentieth Century Literature . (): , –. . Walter Benn Michaels, “‘You Who Never Was There’: Slavery and the New Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust,” Narrative . (): . . Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, ), –. . Michel Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” in Essential Works,  vols., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), , –. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works, vol. , ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, ), . . Maureen McLane, “Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, –,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Katie Trumpener, “Paratext and Genre System: A Response to Franco Moretti,” Critical Inquiry  (): . . Franco Moretti, Maps, Graphs, Trees (London: Verso, ), . . Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers, “The Emergence of Literary Diction,” Journal of Digital Humanities . (), http: //journalofdigitalhumanities.org/-/theemergence-of-literary-diction-by-ted-underwood-and-jordan-sellers/. Constructing a collection like this raises questions of representativeness to which there can be no final answer. We tried to maximize diversity (both demographic diversity, and diversity of subject and genre), while also choosing volumes that seemed to have reached a significant audience. It is also worth noting that we stripped prose introductions and notes from volumes of poetry; otherwise we would be charting changes in the volume of paratext that accompanied verse rather than changes in the diction of verse itself. . Laly Bar-Ilan and Ruth A. Berman, “Developing Register Differentiation: The Latinate-Germanic Divide in English,” Linguistics  (): –. . William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems,  vols. (London: Longman, ), : xxiv. . Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, A Quantitative Literary History of , Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method. Pamphlet . The Stanford Literary Lab, May , http: //litlab.stanford.edu/?page_id=.

194 Notes to Chapter 6

. Underwood and Sellers, “Emergence of Literary Diction.” . For an example of an argument that I believe insists on too close a fusion between quantitative and traditional methods, see Jeremy Rosen, “Combining Close and Distant, or the Utility of Genre Analysis: A Response to Matthew Wilkens’s ‘Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers.’” Post , December , , http: //post.research. yale.edu/archives/. . See Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, “Discipline and Freedom,” in Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). . Johanna Drucker, “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), , . . John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . René Wellek, “Literary History,” in Literary Scholarship: Its Aims and Methods, ed. Norman Foerster (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), .

Index

Aarslef, Hans, 87 Abbotsford, 44–45 Ackroyd, Peter, 138–41 Aestheticism, 10, 112, 143 Amnesia, 41–54, 149–50; caused by electronic media, 149; middle-class, 101–2; postmodern, 150 Ancestral memory, 5, 22, 35–40, 137–41 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 155–56 Aristocracy, 7, 24, 33–34, 38–40, 43–48. See also Landed property Arnold, Matthew, 1, 81–82, 94, 99, 135 Athens, 76–78

Bloom, Harold, 13–14, 161 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount, 69 Books of synonymy, 88–90 Boone, James Shergold, 72 Bourdieu, Pierre, 36, 99, 142 British Museum, 108 Brown Women Writers Project, 166 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 140 Burke, Edmund, 7, 27, 43, 49–50 Burnet, Thomas, 66 Butler, Marilyn, 24 Byatt, A. S., 14, 138–41, 143, 145–46

Babbitt, Irving, 119–20 Bacon, Alan, 97 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 63 Baucom, Ian, 150 Bauman, Zygmunt, 19 Belles lettres, 82, 85 Berlin, Isaiah, 18 Bigland, John, 62 Birkerts, Sven, 147–48 Blackstone, William, 27, 43 Blair, Hugh, 85 Blindness, historical, 5, 17–23, 26, 46–51, 55. See also Amnesia; Perspective, historical

Cambridge, 81, 105, 112 Capitalism, 14, 149 Carlyle, Thomas, 106, 108–10 Castles, 23–25. See also Landed property Catalog poem, historical, 64–70 Causality: historical, 6, 13–14; important to literary history, 120; rejected as unliterary, 129–30, 132, 161–62, 164. See also Continuity, historical Chandler, James, 158 Chiaromonte, Nicola, 17–18 Class, social, 6–7. See also Aristocracy, Gentry, Landed property, Middle 195

196 Index

classes, Professional class, Working class Clio, 63 Close reading, 165 Coke, Edward, 19–20, 25 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 88, 93, 121 Collective time, 8–11, 18–24, 27–54, 172 Colonialism, 31–33. See also Uneven development Columbia University, 113, 116–17 Comparative literature, 12, 115–23, 126, 131–32, 134–35 Composition, 91–93. See also Rhetoric Comte, Auguste, 68 Continuity, historical, 11,13–14; and change, 158–59; assumed to be regressive, 162–63; growing confidence in, 156; imaginary threats to, 153–54; imagined to make literary study scientific, 119–21; and landed property, 7, 27, 43–44; as a rationale for literary study, 83–84. See also Development, Discontinuity, Influence Contrast, historical: defined, 3–5; dominant in literary historicism, 134, 159–63; imagined as immortality, 65–70, 110–11, 146–51; loss of authority, 156, 157–59; middle-class affinities of, 7–8, 98–103; in parallel-lives plots, 35–40, 137–46; persistence, 12–14, 113–15; political implications, 11, 161–63; shaped the period survey course, 95–103; transcends rank, 52–54; valid uses of, 133, 163–64, 171 Corbett, Mary Jean, 39 Course catalogs, 2, 12, 91–105, 121–24 Court, Franklin, 82, 94, 97 Creasy, Edward, 104–5, 109–11, 113 Cultivation: aesthetic, 10, 112, 169; historical, 4, 21–23, 51–52, 84, 140–49; literary, 12; through periodization, 96–107, 112; transcends rank, 51–52. See also Culture, Distinction, cultural Culture: as immortality, 143; autonomy from other forms of status, 8, 36–7, 51–52; concept of, 15, 22–23, 31–34;

declining prestige of, 140–42, 152; distinguished from learning, 174; national, 22–23, 31–34; transcends continuity, 110–11, 152–53; transnational dimension of, 78, 143 Cunningham, Michael, 137–38 Curriculum. See Literary study, Period survey courses, Periodization Dale, Thomas, 91–98 Darwin, Charles, 118 Davis, Kimberly Chabot, 162 Déjà vu, 5, 8, 22, 47–48, 108 DeQuincey, Thomas, 93 Development, historical: central to literary study in the early nineteenth century, 83–85, 95–98; displaced by periodized contrast, 110–11; embattled in the early twentieth century, 12–13, 116–20, 124–26, 132; presently of marginal significance, 158–59, 162. See also Continuity, historical Diachronic concepts, 161–62 Diamond, Jared, 158 Diction, differentiation of, 166–69 Diderot, Denis, 66 Digital humanities: contribution to historicism, 159–60, 164; methodological diversity of, 159; why controversial, 15–16, 164–66, 171–72. See also Quantitative methods Digital media, 15. See also Electronic media Disciplinarity, 12–13, 129–31, 161, 173–75 Discontinuity, historical, 11, 13–14; decline of, 156; in literary study, 84–85. See also Contrast, historical Dispensationalism, 11 Distant reading, 16, 159, 165–66, 170. See also Quantitative methods Distinction, cultural: autonomy of, 7–8; declining value of, 140–42; dependent on historical contrast, 12, 30, 31–32, 68–69, 142; imagined to transcend other forms of status, 35–36, 51–52, 78; middle-class, 99–102 Distinction, social, 7–8, 22–23, 78

Index 197

Doctorow, E. L., 137 Drucker, Johanna, 171–72 DuMaurier, Daphne, 138–39 Duncan, Ian, 44 Durkheim, Emile, 9, 68, 110 Edgeworth, Maria, 32, 34 Electronic media, 145, 147, 149, 151 Eliot, George, 21, 50 Eliot, T. S., 153, 163 Ellis, Kate, 28 End of history, 14, 154–55, 157–58 English language and literature, 81–113. See also Literary study Enlightenment, 7, 18 Essentialism, 71. See also Universalism Etymology, 91–95 Falconet, Etienne Maurice, 66 Feminism, 158, 160 Ferris, Ina, 18, 35 Foucault, Michel, 13, 133–34, 162–63 Fowles, John, 137–38, 144 Fragmentation, 14, 153, 159. See also Discontinuity, historical Fukuyama, Francis, 153–55, 158 Galperin, William, 160 Gellner, Ernest, 22, 31 Gentry, 7, 24, 34, 38–40, 43–48 Gothic novel, 23–31, 38–39, 138–39 Graff, Gerald, 1, 81, 128, 135 Great Britain, 3–4 Greenblatt, Stephen, 146 Guillory, John, 173 Guizot, François, 102–3, 106 Halleck, Reuben P., 13 Harvard University, 121–23 Harvey, David, 153, 156 Hazlitt, William, 67, 95–96 Hegel, G. W. F., 18, 154, 157 Hemans, Felicia, 65–70, 76, 101, 110 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 142 Historical novel, 5, 17–21, 23, 37–54, 103, 140, 152 Historicism, 3, 4–5, 7, 11–12, 23; both

acknowledges and transcends particularity, 70, 79, 106, 143 Historiography, 5, 22, 55–64, 101–13 History: discipline of, 1–2, 6, 109–13; of ideas, 115, 126; of science, 143; social and cultural, 15, 22–23, 57, 76. See also Literary history Homer, 4 Howitts, William and Mary, 64–65 Hugo, Victor, 65 Humanities, 172–73 Hutcheon, Linda, 137 Huyssen, Andreas, 149 Imagination, 8, 69 Immortality: collective dimension of, 9–11, 67–69, 110; as consciousness of historical change, 65–69, 107–9, 144–46; and deep time, 147; in Foucault, 134; in parallel-lives plots, 140–52; theology of, 6–7, 107–8. See also Ancestral memory, Déjà vu, Reincarnation, Resurrection India, literary study in, 81 Influence, literary, 13–14, 119–21, 125–26, 130, 132, 134, 161–63 Interdisciplinarity, 13, 171–72 Intertextuality, 161–62 Interventions, 164 Ireland, 30–40 Iser, Wolfgang, 18, 21 Jameson, Fredric, 137, 141, 150–53 Keats, John, 4, 8, 52, 66, 69–70 King’s College, London, 6–7, 91, 96–104, 106–12 Klein, Kerwin, 148, 150 Koselleck, Reinhart, 20 Landed property, 7, 18–21, 23–30, 38–39, 43–46, 48 Landscape, 27–30 Latham, R. G., 93–94, 111 Law, 19–20 Lee, Yoon Sun, 44 Literary diction, 167–68 Literary history: difficulty of writing,

198 Index

128–30, 164; enduring preference for contrast, 161–64; relation to criticism, 124–27; relation to rhetoric, 83–86; René Wellek’s model of, 127–30; as a science, 118–20, 124–25 Literary study, 1–2, 5–6, 81–135; disciplinary autonomy of, 12–13, 129–31, 173–74; for the middle classes, 99–101; professionalization of, 123–24; rationale for, 81–101, 174–75. See also Literary history, Period survey courses, Periodization Literary theory, 1, 2, 113, 133–35; early twentieth-century, 115, 118–19, 123 Lovejoy, A. O., 126–28, 132, 160–61, 163 Lukács, Georg, 17–18, 21 Lyotard, Jean-François, 153 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 76–80, 103 Mackenzie, Alastair, 118–19, 122 Macpherson, James, 9, 26, 33–34, 66–67 Malley, Shawn, 44 Marx, Karl, 17–18, 150–51, 158, 172, 174 Materialism, social, 15, 128 Maturin, C. R., 30 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 6–7, 85, 96–104, 106–12, 163 McKusick, James, 88 McLane, Maureen, 165 Memory: ancestral, 5, 22, 35–40, 137–41; collective, 148–51; metaphor for history, 22, 35, 141, 143, 148–50 Michaels, Walter Benn, 150, 162–63 Middle classes, 6–9, 11, 19, 52–54, 58, 70, 73, 79–80, 85, 138–39; ideal of independence, 54; need for historical consciousness, 98–103 Mill, John Stuart, 68, 96 Millenialism, 11 Mitford, William, 76–77 Moretti, Franco, 159, 165–66 Morgan, Lady (Sydney Owenson), 30–42, 48–52 Morley, Henry, 112 Morrison, Toni, 162 Moulton, Richard, 115

Napoleonic wars, 42, 63 National tale, 23, 30–40 Nationalism, 6, 12, 50, 142; and the concept of culture, 22–23, 31–32; in the study of literature, 94–95, 99, 106–7 New Criticism, 115, 124, 134–35 New Historicism, 157–58 Nora, Pierre, 148–51 Norman Invasion, 167 Owenson, Sydney, 30–42, 48–52 Oxford, 81, 105, 112 Paine, Thomas, 88 Parallel lives, 14, 35–40, 136–56 Pater, Walter, 10, 143, 151, 163 Path dependency, 123 Period style, 84, 112, 150 Period survey courses: alternatives to, 84–85, 95–96, 121–24; analogy to immortality, 107–11; class-conscious rationale for, 97–103; in the discipline of history, 103–5, 112–13; future of, 15, 171; origin of, 1–2, 6, 84–85, 95–113; relation to specialization, 111 Periodization: challenges to, 12, 116–21, 158, 160–61; curricular origins of, 84–85, 95–113; disciplinary function of, 126–33, 157, 171; durability of, 1–3, 12–14, 113–15, 136; future of, 15, 171; not reducible to boundary-drawing, 3, 161; outside the university, 95–96, 158; waning authority of, 15–16 Perspective, historical, 5, 26, 55–80, 84 Phillips, Mark Salber, 104 Philology, 2, 82–83, 86–87, 91–93, 114–15, 121 Pinter, Harold, 137–38 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 63–64, 89 Posnett, H. M., 116–19, 122 Postmodernism, 14, 136–37, 162 Potkay, Adam, 68 Prestige. See Distinction, cultural; Distinction, social Priestley, Joseph, 58–62, 64, 72, 79 Professional class, 32, 53, 98–99 Progress, 10, 79, 95–96, 163–54

Index 199

Quantitative methods, 15–16, 159, 164–67, 170–75 Race, 94 Radcliffe, Ann, 18, 23–31; connection to Lady Morgan, 34, 38–39; connection to Walter Scott, 47–48, 54 Readings, Bill, 142 Realism, 5, 21, 42, 50–51, 137 Register, linguistic, 168 Reincarnation, 48, 120–21, 138–41. See also Immortality Resurrection, 65–66, 109–110, 139–46, 150–53. See also Immortality Retrofuturism, 154 Rhetoric, 82–83, 85–96 Rogers, Henry, 82–83, 93 Romantic era, 21–22, 55–57, 64, 127, 160 Romanticism, 7, 126–28, 168–69 Rosenberg, Daniel, 59 Ross, Trevor, 7 Ruin sentiment, 45–46, 47–48 Saint-Simon, Henri, 158 Sand, George, 5, 140 Santayana, George, 119 Schmidgen, Wolfram, 7, 19–21, 27–28, 43–44 Schoch, Richard, 109 Scientism, 135, 164, 173 Scotland, 30, 44–46; literary study in, 81 Scott, Walter, 4, 6, 17–23, 40–54, 76, 102–4, 110 Secularization, 11 Sellers, Jordan, 166 Shaw, Harry, 41, 50 Shelley, P. B., 96, 155, 158 Shuttleworth, Sally, 152 Simpson, David, 146–47 Sloane, Barry, 37 Smith, Charlotte, 8 Smith, Olivia, 88 Source-study, 119–21, 124–26, 130, 132, 134. See also Influence, literary Specialization, 2, 84, 111 Spencer, Herbert, 118

Spengler, Oswald, 158 Spivak, Gayatri, 116 Stadial models, 158 Statistics, 172 Stendhal (Beyle, Marie-Henri), 17–18, 50 Stoppard, Tom, 138–44, 146 Surin, Kenneth, 135 Synchronic concepts, 161–62 Taylor, William, 89–90, 92, 94 Technostalgia, 154 Theology, 107–8. See Dispensationalism, Immortality Thierry, Augustin, 102–3 Timelines, 5, 58–62 Tolstoy, Leo, 5, 17–18, 50 Tooke, John Horne, 86–90, 93 Trumpener, Katie, 40–41, 165 Trusler, John, 88–89 Turning points, 166 Uncanny repetition, 36–38, 137–41, 146 Uneven development, 3 United States of America, 4, 73–76 Universalism, 71, 107, 117, 138, 143, 154–55 University College, London, 82–85, 90–99, 104, 109, 111–12 University of Chicago, 115–16, 120, 122 University of Illinois, 123 Warner, Michael, 123 Wellek, René, 13, 116, 126–32, 134, 160, 163, 171 Wells, H. G., 80 Welsh, Alexander, 43 Whiter, Walter, 88 Willard, Emma, 72–76, 101 Williams, Carolyn, 143 Williams, Raymond, 162 Wolfson, Susan, 160 Wordsworth, William, 5, 8, 68, 158, 168–69 Working class, 97 Yale University, 113 Young, Edward, 66