Introduction: Literary History

From the point of view of history (historical inquiry and “method”), the work of literature is both paradox and problem. As Roland Barthes put it, “la litterature est a la fois objet d’histoire et resistance a l’histoire.” History investigates the past, but the literary work inhabits a perpetual present, in the sense that its potential (to move, provoke, absorb) can always be reactivated in the present of reading, in a manner that appears to annihilate the temporal distance separating production and reception. On the one hand, a literary work is an historical document, just like a will, a political pamphlet or a list of corn prices; on the other hand, it engages us beyond the mediations of its original context.