Romanticism &
Contemporary Culture

Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for "Antiquarian" History

David Simpson, University of California, Davis

Notes

* Reprinted by kind permission of SubStance (#88, 1999, pp. 5-16).

¹ On this topic, see my The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half Knowledge (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
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² See, for instance, Thomas James Wise's forgeries of nineteenth-century editions as reported in Richard D. Altick, The Scholar Adventurers (New York and London: The Free Press and Collier-Macmillan, 1966) 37-64.
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³ I have explored this syndrome in Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender, ed. David Simpson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991) 1-33, 163-90.
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⁴ See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York and London: Macmillan, 1899) 363-400.
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⁵ See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3.
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⁶ I have written at length on the anecdote in The Academic Postmodern, 41-71.
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⁷ See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). Greenblatt's chapter "Invisible Bullets" (21-65) is well known as a tour de force of new historical criticism. It moves deftly between the texts of high and low cultures and between different genres as it comments on the plays of Shakespeare; and it implies (without developing) a relation between its historical material and the critics's present in its thesis about the contained or licensed subversiveness of colonialist ideology (35, 37, etc.) which, whether or not it describes the sixteenth and seventeenth century, certainly rings true as a perspective on the condition of the late-twentieth-century literature professor in America. This conjunction cannot be pushed to the point of theorization without, of course, destroying the elegance of the essay and the credibility of its history; but neither can it be ignored by a critic sensitive to the preoccupations of presentist consciousness. So it is registered as a persisting hint, and small chink in the facsimile of "history."
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⁸ This is the argument of Jeffrey C. Alexander, "Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo," in New Left Review, 210 (1995), 63-101.
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