THE SUBJECT

David Perkins's Is Literary History Possible? has been a vade mecum for me as I have been writing this book. Perkins explores post-modern challenges to existing conceptions of literature and history that suggest literary history has become impossible. His focus is on the kind of literary history that I have written in this volume: the single author narrative literary history of a national literature like Hippolyte Taine's History of English Literature (1863) or Francesco de Sanctis's History of Italian Literature (1870–71). Perkins also attends to histories of a particular period within a national literature, devoting a chapter to books and articles that attempt to explain the causes of English Romanticism, to state its important characteristics, and to establish its canon. Examples Perkins does not consider of literary histories closer to my project would include Bonamay Dobrée's English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (1959) and John Butt's English Literature: The Mid-Eighteenth Century, 1740–1789 (1979), both volumes in the Oxford History of English Literature series.

Paradoxically, Perkins concludes that such literary history is both impossible to write with intellectual conviction and necessary to read. Among the reasons Perkins and others offer for the impossibility of literary history are that we no longer know what literature is, that designations of literary types like “genres, periods, schools, and movements” now look “baseless and arbitrary,” and that the past itself is not representable.