The Uses of Literary History

In this collection, Marshall Brown has gathered essays by twenty leading literary critics to appraise the current state of literary history. In provocative, sometimes combative essays, they discuss the writing of literary history, the nature of our interest in tradition, and the ways that literary works act in history. The Uses of Literary History addresses the uses of evidence, anachronism, the dialectic of texts and contexts, particularism and the resistance to reductive understanding, the construction of identities, memory, and the endurance of the past. New Historicism, nationalism, and gender studies appear in relation to more traditional issues, such as textual editing, taste, and literary pedagogy. From a range of disciplinary perspectives, old and new, The Uses of Literary History surveys the theoretical and practical issues that confront scholars at work on the literary past and its relation to the present.