ABSTRACT
This essay first appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 3-32.
T HE principal responsibility of any theory of literary history is to account for stylistic change.1 The shortcoming of a wholly enclosed history of the interrelations of literary texts is that it has no persuasive way to account for the challenge or supplantation of tradition by countertradition, for the replacement of one form or genre by another, for the revival of a form or style whose time might seem wholly to have passed. Presumably, none of us still believes in the “evolutionary” model of the progression of texts, in which forms and styles pass from youthful vitality to full maturity to senescence, are bom and die out, according to some imperative inherent in their own genetic structure. Yet, in its failure to produce a more satisfactory account of stylistic change, the self-enclosed history of texts causes us to behave as if this evolutionary model still possessed explanatory force. If we are to develop more efficacious models, we must enlarge the scope of our consideration from the interrelationships of literary texts to include the historical and social environments in which they were composed or written, heard or read.
