ABSTRACT
Literary history and criticism in a conventional sense was chronicled and celebrated in Rene Wellek's comprehensive History of Modern Criticism, which began with a sketch of eighteenth-century classicism and the divergence between philosophical and literary Kritik, the latter following the methods of ancient and Renaissance 'grammar'. American literary history followed the national model developed by European scholars and was agitated by the same problems of the autonomy of literature versus the intrusions of reductionist history and stifling context. The most impressive product of the intersection between literary and historical studies came in the work of another French triumvirate. In France literary scholars investigated the construction of national history, especially by emphasizing the impact of books, printers, authors, and readers on historical change. Since the eighteenth century language has been a key to intellectual and cultural history, and the advances of linguistic science in the nineteenth century reinforced this position.
