Literary History

By the twenty-first century, the Western model of literary history had been dramatically extended, taking in Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, the South Pacific, and the Arab world. Its approach had been criticized as a series of "generalizations" working through contrasts and continuities—an "institutionalized subjectivity," as the French critic Roland Barthes would have it. (And yet, many believed, such a summary or "distortion" is inevitable if information is to be condensed within a certain remit.) It infers an almost kinetic impact between literary movements, whereas a scientist might argue this is not how things happen, merely a habit of human perception. Is the model then valid? Or is it a piece of illusionism, a series of traditionally accepted linkages? This is the type of question literary history had begun to ask of itself. Having broadened its scope to encompass the world, it was almost the history of everything ("everything" and therefore "nothing," some critics might say).

Thus previous classifications were being reexamined and fresh approaches made, considering not just the text but, for example, the prevalent institution, the critical orthodoxy or heterodoxy, in which it was first received. Threads of movements such as classicism, romanticism, and naturalism, together with critical theory, were being redefined within a pattern that, inevitably, will grow more intricate and extensive as the field of study reaches out to the vernacular, cinematic, and oral, where previously it had focused on the canonical. The new methodology will go far beyond the aesthetic, developing an increasingly comparative methodology, moving between past and present, drawing on disciplines like sociology, economics, and politics.

This epic inclusiveness generates anxiety as well as excitement among its practitioners, who must trace vibrations from reader to society, from society to politics, from politics to the world. Keeping literary history up to date is like being both cannibal and victim, devouring past texts in the hope of completion, only to be swallowed in turn by the recorders of futurity.