The History of Literary History

by Jonathan Bate

Warton trod a similar melancholy path Just over two centuries later, Thomas Warton trod a similar melancholy path: from antiquarian researches to an attempt to write a national literary history to the ignominy of incompletion. Warton’s intention — the epitome of what we would now call the Whig interpretation of history -— was “to pursue the progress of our national poetry, from a rude origin and obscure beginnings, to its perfection in a polished age.” But his three volumes, published between 1774 and 1781, petered out well over a century before the polish of Pope. Warton only made it to the Reformation (though among his unpublished papers at Winchester College there is an interesting further fragment concerning the Elizabethan vogue for sonneteering, in which it is proposed that “it may be necessary to read the first one hundred and twenty six sonnets of our divine dramatist as written by a lady: for they are addressed with great fervency yet delicacy of passion, and with more of fondness than friendship, to a beautiful youth”). Warton regarded medievalism as synonymous with barbarity and modernity with rationality, yet he was enamoured of the Gothic imagination. Like many subsequent historians, he regarded the Elizabethan era as the “golden age” of English poetry because it was poised delicately between the imaginative riches of the Gothic past and the enlightened reason of the future. He had cut his teeth as a literary historian through a seminal book on Edmund Spenser, the poet who most brilliantly combined backward-looking romance with forward-looking Realpolitik.

The irony of Warton’s project was that the very advances in comparative philology and critical historiography that made his book possible were symptoms of the process of “disenchantment” that was marginalizing the poetic imagination. His history was at once a powerhouse of progressive historical scholarship and an elegy for the loss of what his contemporary Richard Hurd called “a world of fine fabling.” All literary historians are haunted by the fear that they are in pursuit of a chimera, that “history” and “poetry” (or, as we would now say, “literature”) are mutually exclusive.

The nineteenth and twentieth century view The tendency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was thus to emphasise either the “history” or the “literary” and to suppress the other half of the equation. There is a direct line of descent from Madame de Stäel’s work of 1800, Literature considered in its relation to Social Institutions, to the “new historicism” of the late twentieth century in which questions of literary value were wholly subordinated to those of ideology. Conversely, the series which the new Oxford English Literary History replaces was a monumental history of literature with the social context largely left out.

History itself overtook the making of literary history In 1935 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press commissioned an Oxford History of English Literature under the general editorship of Bonamy Dobrée and F. P. Wilson. The timing was unfortunate in that the research and writing of the proposed fourteen volumes was supposed to take five to ten years - making for delivery between the years 1940 and 1945. History itself overtook the making of literary history.

But, quite apart from the war, the coverage of what the general editors called “the whole range of letters” within each period of English Literature was a formidable task for an individual scholar. Back before the Great War, the Cambridge History of English Literature had used the more manageable method of dividing up each period-based volume thematically and assigning each chapter to a different scholar, a strategy (still favoured by Cambridge University Press) for the production of encyclopaedic works of reference rather than books to be read through. The advantage of the single-author approach was that it allowed for the creation of genuinely distinctive literary-historical voices; the disadvantage was that half the authors would succumb before the sheer scale of the task.

Bush and Chambers First off the mark was the Harvard scholar Douglas Bush, who in ten years' research and writing covered the period 1600-1660 in six hundred pages of lucid, well-judged literary analysis – but with little attention to the effects on literature of the political cataclysms of the Cromwellian era. Then came E. K. Chambers, whose contribution was the strangely thin and negatively entitled English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, a volume guaranteed to keep the fifteenth century in a ghetto between “the age of Chaucer” and “the age of Shakespeare.”

C. S. Lewis - the liveliest and most opinionated In 1954, C. S. Lewis completed English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, the liveliest and most opinionated volume in the series – and for that reason the one that still attracts readers. The strength of this volume was that it provided a coherently argued vision of the age. Its polemical force perhaps derived from its having been conceived as a series of talks (the Clark Lectures, 1944) rather than within the deadening format of a “textbook.” Lewis thought that the influence of classical humanism was a bad thing, that of the medieval vernacular tradition a good one. Though he was wrong about the former, his emphasis on the latter played an important part in undoing the anti-medieval prejudices of previous generations of classically-trained scholars. The thing that everyone remembers about his volume is that he described mid-sixteenth century literature as “drab” and late Elizabethan as “golden.” Despite Lewis's disingenuous claim that these were descriptive terms, not value-judgments, his book contributed to the neglect of such accomplished writers and translators as George Gascoigne and Arthur Golding during the years when the share prices of Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare rose through the roof of the literary stock market. But the very contentiousness of Lewis's judgments makes his volume continuously interesting, despite the distortions caused by the exclusion of drama (as if the poet of Venus and Adonis had a different sensibility from the playwright of A Midsummer Night's Dream). Those judgments are, however, always literary critical, never historical.

Wilson and Hunter The volume on the drama from 1485 to 1642 was to have been written by F. P. Wilson, one of the general editors, but he only got to 1585 before he died. The draft of his work covering this first hundred years was edited by G. K. Hunter and published in 1969. Hunter went on and took the drama up to 1642 in a volume of his own, which was published in 1997, sixty-two years after the original commission to Wilson. The effect of the delay was to produce an excellent book that sits oddly in its series: Hunter is sharply sensitive to the social pressures on the drama that were so signally neglected by Chambers and Wilson.

Bennett and Gray The original series plan covered the pre-Chaucerian era in two volumes, “English Literature before the Norman Conquest” and “Middle English Literature.” J. A. W. Bennett worked on the latter for most of his life, but left it unfinished at his death in 1981. Douglas Gray “edited and completed” it for publication in 1986. And in the course of nearly sixty years the scholar contracted for the pre-Conquest volume delivered nothing more than a range of proposed chapter titles.

Never was there a juster acronym than OHEL The Oxford History of English Literature — never was there a juster acronym than OHEL —was much possessed by death. The mid-eighteenth century volume appeared in 1979, long after the death of the original author, John Butt; the late seventeenth century in 1969, eleven years after the death of Hugh Macdonald, one of its original co-authors; Geoffrey Tillotson worked on the Victorian volume for nearly forty years, but got no further than preparing an ever-expanding bibliography. Fifteen years after his death it was published in the sub-divided form of two volumes, one on the novel and one on everything else. But even then there were gaps: the oxymoronic-sounding English Literature 1832-1890 excluding the Novel ensured that some of the crucial figures of the 1890s, Wilde above all, were excluded altogether.

J. I. M. Stewart and no T. S. Eliot As for the twentieth century, the volume originally entitled “Modern Literature” appeared in 1963 as Eight Modern Writers. J. I. M. Stewart explained in his preface that he had excluded living writers (thus no T. S. Eliot) and “then attempted a record of the eight who seem to me of unchallengeable importance in the period.” These were Hardy, James, Shaw, Conrad, Kipling, Yeats, Joyce and Lawrence. This meant that “Modern English Literature” consisted of three Irishmen, an American, a Pole, an Indian-born writer, Hardy (whom most would regard as a Victorian), and a Nottinghamshire miner's son who, despising England and Englishness, lived much of his life abroad. Virginia Woolf got three passing sentences, despite the fact that she was herself an accomplished literary historian, whose novel Between the Acts is one of the twentieth-century’s great meditations on England and history.

The turn of the millennium being an appropriate moment to launch OHEL Stewart's emphasis on the close reading of a select “great tradition” and his complete neglect of the social circumstances of literary production was a product of the 1940s and '50s, the heyday of the “new criticism.” Since the original Oxford History of English Literature was commissioned in the early 1930s and began appearing in the immediate post-war years, there have been enormous changes in the ways in which literary history has come to be practised and theorised. Pushed to an extreme, the logic of new criticism and deconstruction could have led to its extinction, but the 1980s and '90s saw a marked “return to history.” The serious study of the literature of the past cannot continue without some form of historical perspective; for all the problems inherent in the activity of literary history, it remains an essential tool. The turn of the millennium being an appropriate moment at which to review the previous thousand years of literary activity, in 1993 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, at the instigation of Kim Scott Walwyn, once again commissioned a multi-volume literary history.

The aim of OHEL was to provide summary accounts of the achievement of as many writers as possible. Virtually forgotten authors were given their page, major ones their chapter, few individual works more than a handful of pages. In most volumes, the historical and social context for literature remained wholly in the background. The new Oxford English Literary History, in contrast, has not been conceived as a comprehensive survey of the works of all “major” and “minor” authors of the last thousand years.

Casting its nets very widely There would be little point in duplicating the project of the old series. Those venerable volumes will still be in the libraries for the odd reader who wants a paragraph on the achievement of, say, Henry Glapthorne or William Oldys. More importantly, it now has to be recognised that even supposedly comprehensive literary histories such as the old OHEL are in fact highly selective. The rediscovery of innumerable women writers of the past, most of whom were completely invisible in the former series, has demonstrated this in the most striking way imaginable. Every literary history has to select; in so doing, it reconfigures the canon. The new OELH is casting its nets very widely and making claims for many works not previously regarded as canonical, but it will inevitably make as many exclusions. As in much of the best recent historical writing, detailed case-studies are preferred to summary listings.

Holding together the “literary” and the “historical" The primary aim of the new series is to explore the diverse purposes of literary activity and the varied mental worlds of writers and readers in the past. Particular attention is given to the institutions in which literary acts take place (educated communities, publishing networks and so forth), the forms in which literary works are presented (traditions, genres, structural conventions), and the relationship between literature and broader historical continuities and transformations. Literary history is distinct from political history, but an historical understanding of literature cannot be divorced from cultural and intellectual revolutions or the effects of social change and the upheaval of war. By attending to the diachronic history of genres and traditions as well as the synchronic analysis of literature in its relation to social institutions, OELH attempts to hold together the “literary” and the “historical.”

The very notion of a national literary heritage A further — and most timely — aim of the Oxford English Literary History is be to undertake a critical investigation of that very notion of a national literary heritage which goes back through Warton to Leland. The series does not call itself the “New Oxford History of English Literature.” The term “English Literature” derives from nineteenth-century notions about both England and Literature that must be scrutinised with care. The title “Literary History” is used in order to avoid explicitly evoking the implications of the word “Literature” that are carried by, say, the National Curriculum for English in Secondary Schools, in which Literature is a body of Novels, Poems and Plays. Historically, a much wider range of writing may properly be considered as “literary” or as belonging within the realm of what used to be called “letters.” The boundaries of the literary in general and of English literary history in particular have changed through the centuries. Each volume maps those boundaries in the terms of its own period.

English Literary History should not presume to colonise “English” has become as controversial a term as “Literature.” American Literature, Australian Literature, Canadian Literature, Caribbean Literature, Indian Literature, Irish Literature, Scottish Literature, Welsh Literature and so forth are now widely regarded as disciplines, or bodies of knowledge, in their own right. An English Literary History should not presume to colonise them. At the same time, American, Australian, Caribbean, Indian, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and other writers have had tremendous influence upon the development of literature in England. Witness J. I. M. Stewart's three Irishmen, an American, a Pole and an Indian-born writer. OELH does not attempt to be a world history of writing in the English language — distinctively American writers such as Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens are excluded — but those Americans who lived and worked in England (e.g. Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath) are included. So too - no doubt controversially -- with Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and “Commonwealth” writers: they have only been included when their work has been produced or significantly disseminated in England. Thus in the case of, say, W. B. Yeats, his poetry will feature in both Joseph Bristow’s 1870-1914: from “Victorian” to “Edwardian” and Chris Baldick’s 1910-1940: Modern Letters, but his work for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin is excluded on the grounds that it belongs to Irish rather than English literary history. At the same time, writers of “hybrid” ethnic identity are of special importance in many volumes, exactly because their non-English origin often places them in an ambivalent relationship with England. Throughout the series, particular attention is paid to encounters between indigenous and other traditions.

Temporal boundaries - cutting the cake in a new way Periodisation is essential to the writing of narrative history, but almost as contentious a matter as geographical and ethnic boundaries. The Oxford English Literary History is cutting this particular cake in a manner both traditional and innovative. For instance, the period around the beginning of the nineteenth century has long been thought of as the “Romantic” one; however we may wish to modify the nomenclature, people will go on reading and studying the Lake Poets and the “Shelley circle” in relation to each other, so it would have been factitious to introduce a volume division at, say, 1810. On the other hand, it is still too soon for there to be broad agreement on the literary-historical shape of the twentieth century: to propose a single break at, say, 1945 would be to fall in with the false assumption that literature moves strictly in tandem with events. Each volume argues the case for its own period as a period, but at the same time beginning and ending dates are treated flexibly, and in many cases — especially with respect to the twentieth century — there is deliberate and considerable overlap between the temporal boundaries of adjacent volumes.

Huge growth in quanitity In order to reflect the huge growth in the sheer quantity of “literature” in the past two hundred years, six of the thirteen volumes in the series will be devoted to the post-Romantic period: 1830-1880, 1870-1914, 1910-1940, 1930-1970, 1960-2000 and 1948-2000. Thus the 1870s can be read in one volume as the end of “high Victorianism” and in another as the point of origin for new movements that culminated in modernism. Similarly, the 1960s belong both in a narrative that reaches back to the political literature of the thirties and a story in which the decade marks the beginning of a new era of experimentation and rebellion (Larkin’s 1963 and all that).

Windrush to 'White Teeth' The final volume will re-tell the story of the literature of the last fifty years from a point of view that begins with the arrival of the Empire Windrush and progresses through Naipaul and Rushdie to the advent of Zadie Smith's White Teeth. It is a source of some satisfaction to the general editor that one of the two volumes on the late twentieth-century, Randall Stevenson’s 1960-2000: The Last of England, is being written by a Scotsman who believes that the idea of “English literature” is no longer a possibility, while the other, Bruce King’s 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature, is written by an American who sees multiculturalism not as the end but as a revivification of the idea.

October 2002