Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book describes as an attempt to pursue the implications for critical method raised by the metaphor that Hartley deploys to such powerful effect. It elaborates the pre-historical method, Pre-histoires I, edited by Michel Jeanneret and Max Engammare at Droz, which took as its title Jeanneret's French translation of the phrase 'the early modern' as 'les seuils de la modernite'. The past that Terence Cave's pre-histories set out to explore survives in particular objects that are firmly rooted in that past and yet seem also to speak to the present. Afterlives share with pre-histories the capacity to probe the myths of origin attached to a particular cultural object and to unpick the status of its 'beginning'. The method of afterlives operates within a framework of what might be termed 'familial' resemblances; in effect, the critic is identifying a subtle genetic trace as it re-appears in incarnations downstream.