We live in the age of the scholarly monograph and the multi-authored history. The shifting and contentious nature of literary studies provides little encouragement to senior scholars to devote decades of their work to taking the long view and accepting responsibility for rendering a comprehensive account of the development of a whole field over a substantial period of time. Our epistemological uncertainty is such that we suspect that fairness and truth can be approximated only if we break up the whole among divers hands and listen to different viewpoints.