Literature as History

Essays in Honour of Peter Widdowson

Simon Barker, Jo Gill, Simon Barker, Jo Gill

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781441174314
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441148025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Literature as History presents a selection of specially commissioned essays by a range of key contemporary thinkers on the interdisciplinary study of literature and history. The unifying theme is the interrelationship between literary / cultural production and its historical moment. The essays in the collection are astute and exciting in terms of their engagement with ever-changing developments in critical and theoretical practice while retaining an invaluable focus on familiar and engaging texts and authors. The contributors offer a reappraisal of the nature of literary studies today, looking back over the thirty-five years of Peter Widdowson's career - a career which has coincided with the emergence of, challenges to, and reformulations of critical theory - and ask what the future holds, particularly for the interdisciplinary ways of working which Widdowson pioneered. Bringing together distinguished scholars in the interdisciplinary study of English and History, it seizes the opportunity to take stock of the current field of literary studies and to ask searching questions about its future development.

Part I

Essays in Criticism

Chapter 1

The Poverty of (New) Historicism

Catherine Belsey

I

In the early 1980s two schools of thought faced each other across the Atlantic Ocean. On the one hand, there was the new historicism, sleek, liberal, scholarly and, although an innovation, as its name announced, oddly reassuring; on the other hand, cultural materialism was sometimes awkward, always radical, driven primarily by conviction and determined to upset apple carts. These opposed points of view had come into being more or less independently and they entailed distinct assessments of the English department’s agenda. Where they diverged most evidently was in cultural materialism’s attention to the institution of English itself and the role of politics in the construction of the discipline. But they overlapped in their concern with the social and cultural context of the fictional work.¹ For both, the text was to be understood as a product of its moment. If cultural materialism also attended to the history of its subsequent reception, they shared, none the less, a commitment to the recognition of historical difference.

Between them, new historicism and cultural materialism have changed the nature of English studies on both sides of the Atlantic. In their wake we have become aware of the continuities between our own work and other areas of the curriculum, most notably history itself, as well as the history of visual culture. Historicism has generated politically aware studies of privilege on the basis of wealth, gender or race. Our knowledge has advanced into more arcane areas of the past, and brought to light obscure and neglected documents once dismissed as ephemeral or unworthy, with the effect of enriching our sense of past cultures. These developments undoubtedly represent major gains. To what extent can we, in consequence, afford to rest on our laurels?

Since the two schools came into existence a generation ago, American new historicism has retained its distinctive identity more sharply than cultural materialism. The British perspective was always more diverse. Where new historicism made its mark first in a monograph, cultural materialism inclined towards the essay form. Stephen Greenblatt’s magisterial Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) focused its attention resolutely on anthropological readings of sixteenth-century works in their context(s); contributors to Peter Widdowson’s influential Re-Reading English (1982) divided their collective energies between polemical accounts of ‘History, Theory, Institutions’ and ‘Case Studies’, the latter consisting mainly of theories of reading, or materialist interpretations of texts from a range of periods.² Against all probability, this more dispersed energy has proved remarkably pervasive. Cultural materialism has modified the practices of English departments without ever sinking into an orthodoxy. Instead, it has issued not only in the analysis of texts in history but also in histories of performance, the book, reading and, indeed, the discipline itself, turning the study of English into a wide-ranging cultural criticism so taken for granted that it barely recognizes a debt to the radical departures of three decades ago.

Conversely, after expanding into all periods of literary history, new historicism continues to flourish as separable category. Rooted in American anthropology,³ the work of Greenblatt and his colleagues was taken up enthusiastically in the United states and then more gradually elsewhere. Perhaps because it is so much easier to define and differentiate,⁴ for many scholars in English departments and beyond, new historicism has come to stand as the prevailing model for the historical location of fictional texts at the moment of their production. In those circumstances, and a generation after its inception, it might be valuable to take stock of the story so far, as well as the possibilities for the future. What does new historicism in its current incarnation do? Could it do more? What might it do in due course?

In order to assess the potential for future developments, let us go back to first principles. What is the project of making a historicist reading of a fictional work? I put the question not in order to generate a single definitive answer but rather to lay out the options. In the first instance, I suppose it might be generally agreed, we stand to gain a clearer sense of the text from an understanding of the conditions of its production and the conventions it invokes, as well as its range of conceivable allusions, attitudes, engagements, its likely evasions and moments of self-censorship, the sympathies it can count on and the hostilities it might generate. Its cultural context has explanatory value for the work in all these ways; a good sense of cultural history means better criticism.

But second, historicism also opens up the possibility of perceiving a relationship between a text and its background that might include difference, as well as the obvious resemblances. We can do more, in other words, than read off from the context what the work is likely to be saying. One slightly dispiriting impression it was possible to take away from the old historicism, with its Elizabethan World Pictures and Discarded Images, was that, sharing so much common ground, all the written texts of the period in question said the same thing again and again. Any given writer, it implied, must be read as taking a particular line because everyone else was. The history of fiction might be seen as supporting the exact opposite. In practice, fiction does not necessarily follow slavishly the fashions of its own time. On the contrary, it might intervene in its moment with a plea for a radical departure, the construction of a utopian vision or, indeed, an appeal to nostalgia, demonstrating that beyond the limitations of conventional thinking in the period a specific work may glimpse alternatives to its own present, if only in fantasy, if only for the duration, if only, precisely, as fiction.

Of course, any text might put forward an oppositional view, especially a political pamphlet, say, or a religious tract. And yet I think fiction represents a special case. Fiction offers a space where anything can happen. In self-proclaimed tales animals talk, magic spells work, the dead return, space ships travel the galaxies. Fiction allows pigs to fly, and this is so even in periods when the conventions of realism are at their most rigorous, most binding. The Victorians, for instance, who demanded in their stories the utmost fidelity to what might actually happen and deplored even coincidence as improbable, loved ghost stories and the Gothic – and not only in down-market genres. There are ghosts in Charles Dickens, as well as Emily Brontë and Henry James. Better still, when two conventions come into collision, rules are necessarily broken and the unexpected is free to make an appearance. As an example, I think of Shakespeare’s comic heroines, girl-boys who move easily between genders, sometimes within a single speech. An emergent mimesis comes up against the all-male stage and, in the circumstances, cross-dressing offers an elegant solution, with the possible concomitant of cross-identification. But the resulting release of possibilities on the stage seems to run way ahead of real-life cross-dressed women, roaring girls like Mary Frith and Long Meg of Westminster, who enlivened the London social scene in the early modern period. Arguably, the plays also outdo in subtlety and flexibility our own most advanced theoretical accounts of gender as performative.

While fiction may, of course, confirm the existing convictions, it can also, then, project a vision that is in certain respects out of step with its moment. Geoffrey Chaucer’s familiarity with the writings of the European Renaissance, for instance, meant his own poetry imported new values into the London of Richard II. In that sense fiction, not alone but most particularly, is capable, we might want to say, of anachronism. Or is it? Is such anachronism literally possible? Our readings, we recognize, made in the present, can certainly be anachronistic, bringing the perspectives of an unrelated epoch to bear on the historical text. But is any work, however eccentric, genuinely at odds with its own chronological moment? Don’t we, instead, expect to stretch our understanding of the culture concerned to accommodate the texts it generates, however wayward?

If, in other words, culture not only forms the context but includes the work of fiction itself, that work can require us to complicate our image of the culture in question. If imagination is not distinct from society but a component of it, our model of culture itself will be one that allows incompatible perceptions to coexist in a heterogeneity that embraces the alternatives imagination invents. Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines register a resistance to the constraints imposed by polarized early modern gender roles; Victorian ghosts point to the perceived limitations of nineteenth-century orthodoxy, whether religious or scientific. When fiction is understood as playing its part in the construction of culture, text and context become relative terms, shifting to localize one another according to the questions we ask of them, and the fictional text is acknowledged as able to be differentially constitutive for the culture of which it is also the outcome.

In this analysis, the interests of literary criticism and cultural history begin to converge. When fiction comes into its own as a constituent of culture and not just its proudest product, the more nuanced cultural history that results has a wider explanatory value when it comes to other fictional texts. In a feedback effect, the inclusion of fiction leads to better cultural history, which leads in turn to better criticism.

II

I am not sure how far the prevailing new historicism acknowledges this second feedback option. New historicists are notoriously economical with expositions of what they are setting out to do, stoutly maintaining (and with some justification) that they are practitioners, not theorists.⁵ In one eloquent exception, however, Stephen Greenblatt’s essay on ‘The Circulation of Social Energy’ promises to explain the cultural ‘exchanges’ that make Shakespeare’s theatre possible. In the event, however, it turns out that these exchanges are effectively all one way: the stage borrows, appropriates, acquires and purchases stories, properties, references and modes of signification from the culture it inhabits. True, it reinvests them. But what it returns is no more than the emotions they generate in heightened form. Although he challenges the belief that fiction does no more than hold the mirror up to nature, Greenblatt’s account of the relationship between the theatre and the world brings us back to a version of the text as no more than the reflection (with an added intensification of feeling) of meanings that are already to be found elsewhere.⁶

No place here, then, for the feedback effect that, treating fiction as constitutive, would lead to a more differential cultural history and a correspondingly more sophisticated criticism. My hopes of a reciprocal account of the relation between text and context were raised, however, when I came across the following observation in James Shapiro’s widely acclaimed and prize-winning book, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, published in 2005: ‘it’s no more possible to talk about Shakespeare’s plays independently of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeare’s insights.’ Here, perhaps, was something of the mutual disclosure I looked for: the times throwing light on the fiction and the fiction expanding our sense of the times. But again it turned out that the role of the stage was confined to condensing what was already there in its cultural world. ‘He and his fellow players’, Shapiro goes on, ‘truly were, in Hamlet’s fine phrase, the “abstract and brief chronicles of the time”’.⁷

Reflection theory seems pervasive in new historicist writing. Does it matter? I think it might. If all they do is reflect meanings and values determined outside them, the plays have no real life of their own: the new historicist project is to see the connection with their moment at the expense of their differences from it. And gradually, as so often in new historicist writing, the texts come to seem less exciting than the culture that produced them. When he brings to life Shakespeare’s age, Shapiro does not disappoint: as social history, 1599 is a good and lively read. But the chapters on the plays seem curiously flat by comparison. Take As You Like It, for example. With one or two minor exceptions, Shapiro’s account of this comedy could have been written at any time in the course of the past 150 years. The play shows, he maintains, how the wrestler Orlando moves under Rosalind’s tuition from self-indulgent romance to mature and mutual love. We get an assessment of Rosalind’s ‘character’ (intelligent, witty, capable of strong feelings) and an assurance that in her care Orlando learns to surrender sterile poetry for ‘genuine intimacy’.⁸

This reading ignores the play’s rapid transformations of its cross-dressed protagonist from sceptical lad to woman in love and back, and with them the sparkling alternations between cynicism and sexiness that challenge...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Essays in Criticism
• Part II: Personalia
• Index