ABSTRACT
Literary cultures provide sources of historical evidence that greatly enrich understandings of the past. This chapter discusses how literary scholars have historicized their examination of the novel in ways that blur the boundaries between historical and fictional narrative and provides both challenges and opportunities for the historian. Renaissance scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt took the scepticism about the existence of the autonomous text and equally autonomous historical self – implicit in the ‘New Historicism’ and argued that both texts and the self are defined by relationships shaped in the culture. The chapter uses the literary and historical writing of the metropolis in order to illustrate how literature and history can enjoy a fruitful and productive relationship. Nostalgia is nonetheless a useful way of thinking about author motivation and suggests one reason why an historian may wish to explore a subjective past and why too that enterprise should be approached with caution.
