History

These four models of literature and history characterize various schools of criticism. The first model is often associated with new criticism or more generally with formalism, which was especially influential in literary studies in the middle decades of the twentieth century. New critics are concerned with literary texts as artifacts which transcend the contingencies of any particular time or place and which resist what they see as a reduction of the aesthetic whole to a specific historical context. Thus, for example, R.S. Crane argues in an essay first published in 1935 that literary history is essentially part of ‘the general history of culture’ (Crane 1967, 20), while a ‘program of literary

studies based on criticism’ would focus on ‘imaginative works considered with respect to those qualities which can truly be said to be timeless . . . in the sense that they can be adequately discerned and evaluated in the light of general principles quite apart from any knowledge of their origin or historical filiation’ (18). The second model is the kind of approach favoured by philological or what we might call ‘background’ critics. Such critics are concerned to describe and analyse literary texts through a consideration of their historical ‘background’, whether biographical, linguistic, cultural or political. The titles of Basil Willey’s two classic studies from 1934 and 1940 respectively indicate this approach: The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion and The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period. For such critics, knowledge of a literary text’s historical circumstances forms the basis for an understanding of that text. The third model tends to be associated more with traditional historical scholarship than with literary criticism, as it assumes that literary texts are in some respect subordinate to their historical context. It also tends to assume that literary texts provide undistorted ‘reflections’ of their time. Thus, for example, in his book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), Keith Thomas appeals to Shakespeare’s works on a number of occasions to justify his arguments. Discussing the practice of cursing, Thomas points out, ‘In Shakespeare’s plays, the curses pronounced by the characters invariably work’, and argues that this is ‘not just for dramatic effect’ but that ‘it was a moral necessity that the poor and the injured should be believed to have this power of retaliation when all else failed’ (Thomas 1971, 507). We might call this model the ‘reflective’ approach. The last model is associated with a new kind of concern with the historical dimensions of literary studies particularly since the early 1980s. This model is specifically associated with new historicist critics in the United States and with cultural materialist critics in Britain (for convenience, we shall use the term ‘new historicist’ in this chapter to cover both varieties). In both cases, this new interest in history has been refracted through the concerns of both Marxism and poststructuralism to produce a complex model of the literary. In this chapter we shall focus on strategies of reading developed by new historicism in order to consider ways in which literary texts may be thought about in historical terms.