Difference between revisions of "Underwood 2013"

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Ted Underwood. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford UP, 2013. Print.

• of more use to the history of English studies perhaps than to literary historical practice esp. with the enriched and temporally flexible periods of St Clair 2004

Intro

• 1: the "institutional structure" of periodization that had undergirded English studies since the 1840s -- other modes of professional organization are possible (area studies in history)
• 2 the value of literary study is "bound up with its ability to define cultural moments and contrast them against each other"
• 2-3 argument: an organizing principle of historical contrast has been central to the prestige of Anglo-American literary culture since the early c19, although its authority is now in decline.
  • "historical contrast" to get broader reference than "periodization" and to highlight what periods do to one another
• 4 again the hegemony of Scott because he "played a central role in popularizing a model of literary culture organized by historical contrast"
  • cf St Clair 2004 for political economy of reading Scott, Griffiths 2016 for analogy as historical model, and Waverley (Scott, 1815) itself
• The larger c18 insight we call "historicism" entailed a recognition that different ages were separated by profoundly different, perhaps mutually incomprehensible, modes of life and thought. The contribution that poets, novelists, and eventually critics made was to propose that literature had a unique ability to render discontinuity imaginable and meaningful. It achieved this not by reducing different eras to some common standard, but by dramatizing the vertiginous gulfs between eras, and then claiming vertigo itself as a source of meaning.
• 5 historical knowledge by "tracing selected differential relations instead of attempting exhaustive coverage"
• 6 periodized literary education for bourgeois, middle classes in its 1840s origins -- period bound with class and nationality
• 7 the normativeness of the model of historical discontinuity emerging from c18 discourse of cultural prestige of highlighting difference
• 11 ...a shift from a model of collective time premised on continuity, to one that dramatized the collective dimension of time by dramatizing discontinuity and multiplicity [but not necessarily challenging orthodoxy]
• 15 polemic: ...outside the academy, it is no longer clear that students need to be taught to recognize periods or differentiate artistic movements from each other.
  • Period concepts may no longer convey the cultural authority they once did, but students still need to discover how thoroughly historical differences can reshape the experienced world.
• 16 the DH implication: "Graphing macroscopic trends is troubling, more fundamentally, because it challenges the principle of contrast that has long distinguished literary culture from the forms of learning surveyed by other disciplines."

Ch 1 Historical Unconsciousness in the Novel 1790-1819

• useful for the uses (...) of history in the early c19 novel
• 18 topos in romantic historical fiction (inc Waverley (Scott, 1815)) of "the protagonist's inability to grasp the historical significance of the plot"
• in gothic novels, the collective past is already as opaque as it will become in historical novels.... what changes between 1790 and 1817 is not that writers discover a newly skeptical theory of social experience -- but rather that the mysterious opacity of the collective past (previously embodied in landed property) is transposed onto personal historical cultivation.
  • relatesto Armstrong 2005: the novel and individualism
• 20 As Reinhardt Koselleck [l/u] has shown, our habit of invoking the past as "history" -- using the word to mean not merely a genre of writing, but the whole course of human events -- is a late c18 invention.... In [the c17], the authority of history was imagined less abstractly.... The broader authority of the past was therefore called "custom" or "antiquity," and it did not have to be borrowed from historians. The collective past was embodied in a wide range of living institutions.
• 21 Schmidgen claims Scott readied the past by making it visible...rather [he argues but I might be able to work more with Schmidgen] c19 novelists began to imply that the really important, invisible part of collective time was located in the minds of their characters...[the effect of which was] to shift the authority of the collective past away from landed property and toward personal cultivation.
• Personal cultivation gives characters access to the collective past most transparently when it takes the form of historical learning...[like] characters discovering old manuscripts
  • an important way the bibliographic imaginary works in the novel
• 22 History becomes important in the romantic novel, in short, because it allows characters to internalize the authority of the past -- previously embedded in institutions and property -- as a portable attribute of character.
• 42 how Scott's novels (he focuses on Guy Mannering and The Antiquary) "collectively refigure the prestige of the past"
• 44 Guy Mannering as a Shakespearean romance plot
• 46 the analogy between Mannering's subjective sense of time and the historical time manifested in Ellangowan [the estate -- two forms of blindness to aspects of time]
  • 48 ...the return to an ancestral home is important, not because the home itself bears legible historical traces, but because it awakens a temporal vertigo that allows the protagonist to glimpse the shadowy historical backdrop of his life.
• 52 ...the appeal of "historical amnesia" comes from its power to dramatize cultural distinction as a free-floating mode of distinction, perpendicular to ordinary classifications of rank.... A fantasy likely to appeal...to the middle classes.
  • the use of characters reading old chronicles or Shakespeare even when we/they don't know their property or rank

Ch 2 Invention of Historical Perspective

• 56-7 the predominant metaphor of "historical perspective" for historical consciousness originates at the end of the c18 and "is dramatized as a tension between the determinate present moment and the multiplicity of vanished possibilities that shadow it"
• expanding audience for history and print forms of history: abridgements, summaries, manuals of universal history for middle class readers
• 58 the comparative project of history after Priestley, with the task of "integrating experience that would otherwise be atomized"
  • cross ref with Griffiths 2016 on analogy
• 62-3 readers of history were instructed to be "selective and contrastive," offering "the process of summary and abridgement as a model of the formation of historical consciousness."
  • reified by post 1774 intellectual property regime change and return of abridgment as a mode of understanding narrative -- St Clair 2004, Price 2000
• 64ff romantic "historical catalog poems" incl. ones by Felicia Hemans like "Voice of the Wind" and Ossian (covered in Gidal 2015)
• 76 l/u Macaulay's review of Mitford's History of Greece in 1824, interesting on cultural history and on relationship btwn history and the novel
• 79 the further development of the meritocratic bourgeois value of history, at the distance of perspective "the only distinction that matters is the mental cultivation that allows an observer to rise above his or her own location and survey the diversity of human history" vs the earlier model of biographical example
• l/u Philip Connell's Romanticism, Economics and the Q of Culture ch 3 for divergence of cultural pursuits and political economy