ABSTRACT

In the decade of the 1840s, 'there occurred a cataclysmic event, far more dramatic than anything that happened in England, a very short geographical distance away .... That was, of course, the famine in Ireland — a disaster without comparison in Europe. Yet if we consult the two maps of either the official ideology of the period or the recorded subjective experience of its novels, neither of them extended to include this catastrophe right on their doorstep, causally connected to sociopolitical processes in England.' According to the editors of New Left Review, who offer this statement for Raymond Williams' consideration in Politics and Letters (1979), English fiction of the nineteenth century and the English criticism concerned with it have both privileged 'national experience,' and thus have omitted what by many accounts would be the most significant aspects of the period. Because the French Revolution of 1848, for example, is 'not a national experience in the direct sense', neither it nor other 'foreign or overseas developments' can turn up in Williams' account of the English literature of the 1840s. For Williams' interlocutors, the conclusion extends to literary criticism as a whole: it is not possible to work back from texts to structures of feeling to experiences to social structures.' Since literary texts are tied to 'experience' and since 'experience' seems to neglect whatever is distant or international, the study of literature cannot be asked to furnish knowledge of 'the total historical process' or of how human beings might act in and upon 'an integrated world economy'. 1