ABSTRACT
Until the late 1970s, there was (outside Marxist criticism) a generally accepted view of the nature of history and its place in literary studies. Perkins (1991) points out that during most of the nineteenth century, literary history was popular and enjoyed prestige because it produced a more complete appreciation of the literary work than was otherwise possible. It functioned, too, as a form of historiography, revealing the ‘“spirit”, mentality or Weltanschauung of a time and place with unrivaled precision and intimacy’ (Perkins 1991:2). For much of the twentieth century, especially in Renaissance studies, history was seen as outside literature and as guaranteeing the truth of a literary interpretation: ‘History…was the single, unified, unproblematic, extra-textual, extra-discursive real that guaranteed our readings of the texts which constituted its cultural expression’ (Belsey 1991: 26). In the traditional literary view of history and culture, there was no difficulty in relating text to context: history was singular and operated as a ‘background’ to the reading of a work of literature (‘the foreground’); and culture was something which the work reproduced or expressed, or could be set against. Literary history was ‘a hybrid but recognizable genre that co-ordinated literary criticism, biography, and intellectual/social background within a narrative of development’ (Buell 1993: 216).
