ABSTRACT
At the start of the previous chapter I wrote sceptically of current critical movements-old historicism, spirituality, neurological determinism. Leafing through publishers’ catalogues, the most common approach in the literature sections is literary history. This manifests a falling away from the broad ambitions of new historicism and cultural materialism; ambitions that expanded the kind of text that may operate as context, and undermined the priority of ‘literature’. In literary history the acceptable context is other literary texts, allowing the advantages of historical location while preserving the transcendence of literature as a category. Here I discuss two problems with literary history, and how a cultural materialist might prefer to deal with them. The first is that it tends to take ‘literature’ for granted.
