ABSTRACT
Much of the controversial energy aroused by Romantic New Historicism is, appropriately, theoretical and methodological. What, for example, counts as historical evidence in a literary argument? To what extent can “history” and “literature” be legitimately—rather than conventionally—differentiated? Which historical facts or contexts brought to bear on any literature are not always already interpretations? Literary scholars often take their sense of the era’s history as given, and historians do the same for its literature; we each do our really specialized interpretive work on “our side” of the line. Because we are most often dealing with particular cases—persons, events, and works—we rarely have the time or, frankly, the need to notice how these literatures and this history are, in sum, themselves constructs, not immutable, but changing over time. To illustrate the often invisible tensions between literature and history, I propose to engage—or, better, provoke—these large theoretical issues by examining some detailed biographical facts.
