ABSTRACT

What the major approaches to literature that I have so far discussed have in common is that they focus strongly on literature itself. Richards’s practical criticism and the New Criticism limit themselves in their search for a text’s meaning to the ‘words on the page’. Formalism is primarily interested in what makes literature different from other ways of using language and in the literary reasons for literary-historical change. Structuralism seeks to establish the structures that underlie narratives and that make meaning possible. Conspicuously absent is a serious interest in what many literary academics would now consider very important issues such as the historical situatedness, or historical embedment, and the politics of literary texts. To what extent are literary texts the product of the historical period in which they were written? The world has gone through enormous socio-economic and political changes in the last millennium. Isn’t it reasonable to expect those changes to turn up in our literature? And isn’t it at least plausible to assume that those changes have somehow affected the way we experience things? Can the human condition have remained essentially the same? And what sort of view of politics do we find in a given text? Does the text support the socio-economic and political status quo or does it take an openly or more implicitly critical stance?