Introduction: what is nineteenth-century literature?

The division of literary history into a series of distinct chronological periods, of which the nineteenth century can obviously be one, takes place after the events which that history describes. It is therefore retrospective and may seem, to some extent, an arbitrary process, one which begs a number of questions. In terms which are relevant to the present volume, what makes 1800 or 1899 so special that they become respectively a beginning and an end point? What, in terms of the history of literature, do they mark the beginning and ending of? Any history has to make the study of the past manageable, and one of the commonest ways of doing so is by dividing it into chronological units. However, we might want to enquire whether events in literary history organise themselves neatly into a chronology, and whether that chronology can conveniently be mapped onto century divisions. As important is the question of defining what those literary ‘events’ are. Is literary history an account of works, authors, movements or styles? And how do literary events relate to those described in social, economic or political histories? In this chapter we examine briefly some of the general theoretical and methodological problems involved in writing literary history, and explain how the present volume responds to them.