ABSTRACT
Debates about politically inflected literary interpretation both inside and outside the academy almost always see such approaches as recent. And they often take the literature classroom as their stage. Such modes of politically attuned literary interpretations have been core to the discipline of literary studies, especially to the classroom teaching of literature at a wide array of higher education institutions since the late nineteenth century. This chapter explains how and why the political interpretation of literature came to seem recent, and argues that we need to revise this disciplinary narrative in order to better understand current practices and the actual threats to the future of literary study.
