Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:58:09.481Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Poverty of Context: Historicism and Nonmimetic Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christopher Lane
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When scholars heed the “historicist turn” in literary criticism, invariably they try to situate a work in its relevant context. Doing so seems to confirm the work's social significance and its relation to proximate historical events. But what happens when a work dissolves these implied connections, rendering them provisional or meaningless? Is it evading context or pointing intelligently to that phenomenon's limited powers of determinism? This essay reconsiders whether contexts help or hinder understanding of especially antirealist fiction. What escapes context, I argue, alternately transfigures and defamiliarizes experience, thereby complicating our relation to the past.

Type
Special Topic: Imagining History
Information
PMLA , Volume 118 , Issue 3: Special Topic: Imagining History , May 2003 , pp. 450 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Ed. Gooder, Jean. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.Google Scholar
Adams, Robert Martin. Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.Google Scholar
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left, 1971. 123–73.Google Scholar
Ankersmit, F. R. Historical Representation. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Isobel. The Radical Aesthetic. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” W. H. Auden: Collected Poems. Ed. Mendelson, Edward. Rev. ed. London: Faber, 1991. 247–49.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. “Figura.” Archivum Romanicum 22 (1938): 436–89. Rpt. in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Fwd. Paolo Valesio. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. 11–76.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953.Google Scholar
Bauerlein, Mark. Literary Criticism: An Autopsy. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. New York: Methuen, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Tony. Outside Literature. New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Brecht, Bertolt. “On the Formalistic Character of the Theory of Realism.” Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno. Trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor. London: Verso, 1977. 70–76.Google Scholar
Brisman, Leslie. “Back to the First of All: ‘By the Fire-Side’ and Browning's Romantic Origins.” Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Bloom, Harold and Munich, Adrienne. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1979. 39–58.Google Scholar
Browning, Robert. Robert Browning: The Poems. Ed. Pettigrew, John with Collins, Thomas J. 2 vols. New Haven: Ya le UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Bulwer Lytton, Edward. Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners. New York: Harper, 1864.Google Scholar
Bulwer Lytton, Edward. “On the Distinction between Active Thought and Reverie.” Bulwer Lytton, Caxtoniana 129–36.Google Scholar
Bulwer Lytton, Edward. “On the Normal Clairvoyance of the Imagination.” Bulwer Lytton, Caxtoniana 33–41.Google Scholar
Bulwer Lytton, Edward. Preface. 1845. Night and Morning. London: Routledge, 1851. vii–xii.Google Scholar
Bulwer Lytton, Edward. A Strange Story: An Alchemical Novel. London: Routledge, 1875.Google Scholar
Burwick, Frederick, and Pape, Walter, eds. Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: The Centenary Edition. Ed. Haughton, Hugh. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.Google Scholar
Chandler, David. “‘One Consciousness’: Historical Criticism and the Romantic Canon.” Romanticism on the Net 17 (2000). 5 Feb. 2003 <http://users.ox.ac.uk~scat0385/17ideology.html>.Google Scholar
Christ, Carol T. The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Clark, Michael P., ed. Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colebrook, Claire. New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Collini, Stefan. “Culture Talk.” New Left Review 2nd ser. 7 (2001): 43–53.Google Scholar
Collini, Stefan. “Defending Cultural Criticism.” New Left Review 2nd ser. 18 (2002): 73–97.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. “Henry James: An Appreciation.” Notes on Life and Letters. Garden City: Doubleday, 1923. 11–19.Google Scholar
Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994.Google Scholar
Dean, Tim. “The Germs of Empire: Heart of Darkness, Colonial Trauma, and the Historiography of AIDS.” The Psychoanalysis of Race. Ed. Lane, Christopher. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 305–29.Google Scholar
Delacroix, Eugène. Journal 1822–1863. Pref. Hubert Damisch. Introd. and notes by André Joubin. Paris: Plon, 1980.Google Scholar
Delacroix, Eugène. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix. Trans. Walter Pach. New York: Covici, 1937.Google Scholar
de Man, Paul. “The Resistance to Theory.” The Resistance to Theory. Fwd. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3–20.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ed. Cox, Arthur J. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edmundson, Mark. Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, John M. “The Relevant Context of a Literary Text.” The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974. 104–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finn, Mary E. Writing the Incommensurable: Kierkegaard, Rossetti, and Hopkins. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “The Functions of Literature.” Interview with Roger-Pol Droit. 20 June 1975. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984. Ed. Kritzman, Lawrence D. Trans. Alan Sheridan et al. New York: Routledge, 1988. 307–13.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Bouchard, Donald F. Trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 139–64.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Aus der Geshichte einer infantilen Neurose. Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch Geordnet. With the cooperation of Marie Bonaparte. Ed. Anna Freud et al. Vol. 12. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1940. 27–157. 18 vols. 1940–52.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. “Counterhistory and the Anecdote.” Gallagher and Greenblatt 49–74.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. “Marxism and the New Historicism.” Veeser 37–48.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine, and Greenblatt, Stephen. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gearhart, Suzanne. “Reply to Stephen Greenblatt.” New Literary History 28 (1997): 483–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gearhart, Suzanne. “The Taming of Michel Foucault: New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and the Subversion of Power.” New Literary History 28 (1997): 457–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
George, David. “Four New Browning Letters: Robert Browning to the Rev. James Graham of Much Cowarne.” Studies in Browning and His Circle 2.1 (1974): 61–70.Google Scholar
Gossman, Lionel. Between History and Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Green, Geoffrey. Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer. Fwd. Robert Scholes. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.” Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts. Ed. Parker, Patricia and Quint, David. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 210–24.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. “A Response to Suzanne Gearhart.” New Literary History 28 (1997): 481–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Touch of the Real.” Gallagher and Greenblatt 20–48.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” Veeser 1–14.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Paul. Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Hardy, Barbara. Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction. London: Methuen, 1986.Google Scholar
Hawthorn, Jeremy. Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literary Debate. London: Arnold, 1996.Google Scholar
William, Irvine, and Honan, Park. The Book, the Ring, and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning. New York: McGraw, 1974.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Wendy S. The Companion to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. London: Allen, 1986.Google Scholar
James, Henry. The American Scene. Ed. Sears, John F. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.Google Scholar
James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Shapira, Morris. New York: Cambridge UP, 1963. 49–67.Google Scholar
James, Henry. Preface. The Aspern Papers. The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Anthony Curtis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. 27–42.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. D. H. The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry: Sources of the Poetic Imagination in Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952.Google Scholar
Jones, Jason B. “Histories of the Real: Aesthetics and Historiography in the Victorian Novel.” Diss. Emory U, 2002.Google Scholar
Knapp, Steven. Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-formalism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Korg, Jacob. “Browning's Art and ‘By the Fire-Side.‘” Victorian Poetry 15 (1977): 147–58.Google Scholar
Krieger, Murray. “Two Faces of an Old Argument: Historicism versus Formalism in American Criticism.” The Institution of Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 24–47.Google Scholar
Lane, Christopher. “The Arnoldian Ideal; or, Culture Studies and the Problem of Nothingness.” Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Anderson, Amanda and Valente, Joseph. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. 283–311.Google Scholar
Lane, Christopher. “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis.” Lacan in America. Ed. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. New York: Other, 2000. 309–47.Google Scholar
Lane, Christopher. “Victorian Asymmetry: The Study of Repression and Desire.” The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 1–43.Google Scholar
Lentricchia, Frank. “Foucault's Legacy: A New Historicism?” Veeser 231–42.Google Scholar
Levine, George. “George Eliot's Hypothesis of Reality.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1980): 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levine, George. “Reclaiming the Aesthetic.” Introduction. Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 1–28.Google Scholar
Lewis, Thomas E. “Notes toward a Theory of the Referent.” PMLA 94 (1979): 459–75.Google Scholar
Litvak, Joseph. “Back to the Future: A Review-Article on the New Historicism, Deconstruction, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 120–49.Google Scholar
Liu, Alan. “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism.” ELH 56 (1989): 721–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macherey, Pierre. “Problems of Reflection.” Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Essex, July 1976. Ed. Barker, Francis et al. Colchester: U of Essex, 1976. 41–54.Google Scholar
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1978.Google Scholar
Karl, Marx, and Engels, Frederick. The German Ideology, Part I. Ed. Arthur, C. J. London: Lawrence, 1970.Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome J. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.Google Scholar
McGann, Jerome J. “The Scandal of Referentiality.” Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. 115–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. “Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.” PMLA 102 (1987): 281–91.Google Scholar
Montrose, Louis A. “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” Veeser 15–36.Google Scholar
Mulhern, Francis. “Beyond Metaculture.” New Left Review 2nd ser. 16 (2002): 86–104.Google Scholar
Mulhern, Francis. Culture/Metaculture. London: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Ed. Breazeale, Daniel. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. 59–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nora, Pierre. “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Ed. Nora. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. 1–20. 3 vols.Google Scholar
Partner, Nancy F. “Historicity in an Age of Reality—Fictions.” A New Philosophy of History. Ed. Ankersmit, Frank and Kellner, Hans. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 21–39.Google Scholar
Pechter, Edward. “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama.” PMLA 102 (1987): 292–303.Google Scholar
Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Popper, Karl R. The Poverty of Historicism. New York: Basic, 1960.Google Scholar
Reilly, Jim. Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad, and George Eliot. New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Rock, Irvin. “Anorthoscopic Perception.” Scientific American Mar. 1981: 145–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline. “‘This Is Not a Biography.‘” London Review of Books 22 Aug. 2002: 12–15.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Harry E. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3–24.Google Scholar
Simpson, David. Situatedness; or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.Google Scholar
Smith, Lindsay. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Sprinker, Michael. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism. New York: Verso, 1987.Google Scholar
Steiner, Wendy. The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.Google Scholar
Stern, J. P. On Realism. London: Routledge, 1973.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. “Preface to a Lyric History.” The Uses of Literary History. Ed. Brown, Marshall. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 199–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tallis, Raymond. In Defence of Realism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. “The Poverty of Theory; or, An Orrery of Errors.” “The Poverty of Theory” and Other Essays. London: Merlin, 1978. 193–397.Google Scholar
Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
Villanueva, Darío. Theories of Literary Realism. Trans. Mihai I. Spariosu and Santiago García-Castañón. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997.Google Scholar
Whistler, Whistler James Abbott. “Ten O'Clock.” The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Introd. Alfred Werner. New York: Dover, 1967. 131–59.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 81–100.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 101–20.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. “New Historicism: A Comment.” Veeser 293–302.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory.” The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. 26–57.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. 1–25.Google Scholar
Williams, Carolyn. Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Woodbridge, Linda. “A Strange Eventful History: Notes on Feminism, Historicism, and Literary Study.” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1990): 692–96.Google Scholar