ABSTRACT
Can literature legitimately serve as an historical archive?1 Although it is not quite true that “Everybody does it!” as I have heard said repeatedly, the use of novels, poems, and plays as illustrations and sources in the work of historians is remarkably common. In conversations and more formal interchanges at conferences, historians of culture and literature readily recognize that “it is done all the time,” referring to work by Lucien Febvre, Robert Darnton, Terry Castle, Felicity Nussbaum, Deidre Lynch, Terry Eagleton, Lynn Hunt, Susan Dunn, Mary Louise Roberts, Bruce Robbins, and others.2 To say that art is regularly used as cultural artifact is,
1 The question I pose is somewhat different from those that have previously interested scholars. Lionel Gossman, “History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification,” The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Marison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978) 3-39; Jean Serroy, “Le Roman et l’histoire au XVIIe siècle avant Saint-Réal, Studi francesi 37.2 (1993): 243-50; Herbert Lindenberger, The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) have, for example, been drawn to the period when history became a genre distinct from novels and other genres like biography and scientific treatises. Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970) agrees with most others that these distinctions took place in the eighteenth century. He goes on to analyze the ways literature differs from history. Aristotle (Poetics, ch. 9) and many, many others have taken up the latter issue. See, for just a few examples, Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” in Canary and Kozicki’s collection The Writing of History, 129-49; David H. Walker, “Literature, History and Factidiversiality,” Journal of European Studies 25 (1995): 35-50; Paul Hernadi, “Clio’s Cousins: Historiography as Translation, Fiction, and Criticism,” New Literary History 7.2 (1976): 247-56; Murray Crieger, “Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality,” Critical Inquiry 1.2 (1974): 335-60; P. M Wetherill, “The Novel and Historical Discourse: Notes on a Nineteenth-Century Perspective,” Journal of European Studies 15 (1985): 117-30.
