Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for “Antiquarian” History

YES INDEED. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN, and is perhaps now more so than ever. For the most part our approach has been compulsively inclusive; nothing human or inhuman is alien to us. As a matter of moral and/or professional impulse, scholars and teachers of literature have always wanted to read a world through a text and in a text, even if some have insisted that such is not their business. Efforts at limiting the scope of our professional attentions, whether by textual editors, by deconstruction with its formal-linguistic “rigor,” or by the New Criticism, have always been resisted as pure definitions of the discipline, and have survived principally by being allowed into the company of other and wider-ranging interpretive conventions, as parts of an ever-expanding whole. Old fashioned, restricted literary history conceived as the influence of one writer upon another has lately flourished most visibly in the form of polemical pastiche, in the work of Harold Bloom, rather than as an agreed-upon norm for the present conduct of criticism. Intellectually and philosophically, with or without moral impulse, there seems to be next to nothing that can be safely excluded in an a priori way from the historicization of a literary work.