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Introduction: On Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2024
Abstract
Literature and history as objects of study and fields of inquiry have shaped each other in profound if asymmetrical ways. This introduction provides a brief account of how these disciplines intersect in the GAPE and the contemporary era, emphasizing concerns with expertise and amateurism that also emerge in many of the articles in this special issue. Those concerns, in turn, relate to what the articles show are literature’s pedagical functions in the GAPE and the present moment and within and beyond the classroom. As it argues, literature’s pedagogical dimensions challenge distinctions between teaching, research, and activism in the context of current debates about if and how historical and literary study should be presentist and politically committed.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 See Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, 20th anniversary ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 96, 101–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For a classic account of the concept and ideal of “objectivity” in the discipline of history (with some reference to literary studies), see Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Homer C. Hockett, “The Literary Motive in the Writing of History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12 (Mar. 1926), 476, quoted in Higham, John, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1965] 1990), 97 Google Scholar.
4 Higham, History: Professional Scholarship, 97.
5 White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973 Google Scholar.
6 For a critique of presentism, see James H. Sweet’s American Historical Association Presidential Address “Is History History?: Identity Politics and the Teleologies of the Present,” Perspectives on History (Sept. 2022), https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/september-2022/is-history-history-identity-politics-and-teleologies-of-the-present (accessed Jun. 26, 2023). His remarks were understood as a critique of (and in turn, were critiqued by) scholars of Black studies, a field that has long challenged distinctions between disciplines, including those of literature and history. For responses to Sweet, see Keisha Blain, “Black Historians Know There’s No Such Things as Objective History,” The New Republic, Sept. 9, 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/167680/presentism-history-debate-black-scholarship (accessed Jun. 26, 2023); Kevin Gannon, “On Presentism and History; Or, We’re Doing This Again, Are We?” The Tattooed Prof, https://thetattooedprof.com/2022/08/19/on-presentism-and-history-or-were-doing-this-again-are-we/ (accessed Jun. 26, 2023); Priya Satia, “The Presentist Trap,” Perspectives on History, Sept. 7, 2022, https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/october-2022/responses-to-is-history-history (accessed Jun. 26, 2023); Joan W. Scott, “History Is Always About Politics: What the Recent Debates Over Presentism Get Wrong,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 24, 2022 https://www.chronicle.com/article/history-is-always-about-politics (accessed Jun. 26, 2023).
7 On the pedagogical role of literature in the context of the GAPE, see also Fisher, Laura, Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Castronovo, Russ, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Buurma, Rachel Sagner and Heffernan, Laura, The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 210 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.