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The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History of English Literature after Postmodernism

Paper · 2007 · Margit Sichert

Summary

This essay asks what becomes of English literary historiography after the canon wars of the 1980s–90s and postmodern doubts about whether literary history can be written at all. Sichert sets several recent single-volume British histories against the nineteenth-century tradition: Carter and McRae's Routledge History, Michael Alexander's A History of English Literature and Peck and Coyle's Brief History. Her method is close comparative reading of tone, values and treatment of canonical authors. The Routledge volume, praised by Malcolm Bradbury, revives older goals: it addresses the general reader, frames literature as cultural history and stresses literature's humane and moral role, while giving more room to women writers. Alexander's book is set out for teaching, but its prose is ironic and close to fiction. It inverts Victorian valuations, for example of Gaskell and Tennyson, yet takes British superiority for granted. Peck and Coyle bring recent critical theory into the narrative. The middle of the extracted text is missing, so the full argument is not available here. The essay's main conclusion is that old functions of literary history survive in new forms, including ironic ones, and still help keep collective cultural memory alive.

Key points

  • The essay starts from David Perkins' Is Literary History Possible? (1992) and the canon-wars debate, then notes that new histories kept appearing regardless.
  • In his 2000 foreword to the Routledge History, Bradbury values plain storytelling, freedom from critical jargon and attention to the common reader. These were also aims of nineteenth-century historians such as Robert Chambers, who wrote the first complete history in 1836 and the Cyclopaedia in 1843.
  • Alexander's history is built around boxed biographies, timelines, key-term definitions and maps. Its learning-oriented design echoes Victorian exam handbooks, which served the Civil Service literature entrance exams required from 1856.
  • Alexander reverses Victorian valuations: he ranks Gaskell as second-rate without giving reasons, deflates Tennyson's family story and rates Austen highly for her irony. Sichert reads a possible hidden national superiority behind this irony.
  • Peck and Coyle aim for a narrative with a strong argument, show texts interacting with their era, and add current theory.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Sichert detects irony by noting that grave events, such as royal executions of writers, are told in a flat, list-like, almost joking register, so the seriousness of the content clashes with the tone.
  • I2. When Alexander gives a verdict with no grounds, Sichert explicitly lists the readings a reader might infer (anti-Victorian, anti-sentiment, objections to form or content).
  • I3. Sichert spots an unquestioned national superiority in a sentence about Johnson's praise of Shakespeare being taken seriously "even in France". The word "even" smuggles in an assumption about how expected that reception was.
  • I4. Sentences like "both died Catholics, Erasmus in his bed" get their joke from an elided, gapped second clause.
  • I5. Sichert's whole method is to judge each new history against a fixed historical baseline (nineteenth-century histories) on the same canonical authors.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): an irony cue could compare the severity of events in the frames, such as killing or execution, with the evaluative register of the clause, and flag a large mismatch as possible irony with the reason attached.
  • I2 (frames): when an evaluative statement has no stated cause, the implicature module could produce a ranked, explainable set of candidate motives instead of choosing one silently.
  • I3 (world): treat scalar particles like "even" as triggers that add a presupposed ranking to the world of the text, so later answers can expose the hidden assumption.
  • I4 (tree): sentences of this kind make good test cases for gapping and ellipsis in the UD parser, checking that the elided predicate is restored before frames are built.
  • I5 (learn): evaluation could likewise compare outputs on fixed anchor items across system versions, so that shifts in judgment show up concretely rather than only as aggregate scores.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Justus-Liebig-Universität GießenGiessen · Germany3 works · 1 citation

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 worksHistory · 85 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Margit Sichert. 2007. The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History of English Literature after Postmodernism. Literatūra (Vilnius) 49.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15388/litera.2007.5.7942

@inproceedings{sichert2007old,
  title = {{The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History of English Literature after Postmodernism}},
  author = {Margit Sichert},
  booktitle = {Literatūra (Vilnius) 49},
  year = {2007},
  doi = {10.15388/litera.2007.5.7942},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15388/litera.2007.5.7942}
}

References

2 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  2. London, 1874. Garrod, H.W. “Humour”. The Character of England. Ed. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 340–351. Grabes, Herbert. “Literary Histories as Fictions of Collective Cultural Memory.” Pase Papers in Literature, Language and Culture. Part One. Papers in Literature and Culture. Ed. Grazyna Bystydzienska, Emma Harris and Paddy Lyons. Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2005. —. “The Canon Pro and Contra:`The Canon is Dead-Long Live Pick and Mix.’” Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies 30 (2004): 35–49. —. “Literature, Collective Memory, and National Identity.” Anglistentag 2003 München: Proceedings. Ed. Christoph Bode, Sebastian Domsch & Hans Sauer. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004. 307–23. —. “Canon Making and Cultural Memory: The Creation of English Literature through the Writing of Literary Histories.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 10.1(2003): 11–25. —. “Literary History and Cultural History: Relations and Differences.” Literary History/ Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 17. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2001. 1–34. Jay, Gregory. American Literature and the Culture Wars. Ithaka, NY: Cornell UP, 1997. Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the English Poets; and a Criticism on their Works. 3 vols. Dublin: Whitestone, Williams, Colles, Wilson, a.o., 1779–81. Müller, Kurt. “Zwischen kulturellem Nationalismus und Multikulturalismus: Zur literarischen Kanondebatte in den USA.” Begründungen und Funktionen des Ka-nons: Beiträge aus der Literatur – und Kunstwissens-chaft, Philosophie und Theologie. Ed. Gerhard R. Kaiser & Stefan Matuschek. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2001. 191–215. Nünning, Ansgar. “On the Englishness of English Literary Histories: Where Literature, Philosophy and Nationalism Meet Cultural History.” Critical Interfaces: Contributions on Philosophy, Literature, and Culture in Honour of Herbert Grabes. Ed. Gordon Collier, Klaus Schwank, and Franz Wieselhuber.Trier: WVT, 2001. 281–99. Nünning, Vera, ed. Kulturgeschichte der englischen Literatur. Von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart. A. Francke: Tübingen and Basle, 2005. Peck, John and Coyle, Martin. A Brief History of English Literature. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002. Robinson, Lilian S. In the Canon’s Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1997. Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Saintsbury, George. A Short History of English Literature. London: Macmillan, and Martin’s Press, New York, 1966. (First edition 1898). Shaw, Thomas Budge. Outlines of English Literature. London: John Murray, 1849. Sichert, Margit & Grabes, Herbert: “Literaturgeschichte, Kanon und nationale Identität.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven. Ed. Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nünning. Berlin und New York: de Gruyter, 2005. 297–314. —. “Implanting Literary History in Cultural Memory: Robert Chambers’ History of the English Language and Literature.” Literature, Literary History, and Cultural Memory. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 21. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005. 97–128. — - . “Functionalizing Cultural Memory: Foundational British Literary History and the Construction of National Identity”. Modern Language Quarterly 64.2 (2003): 199–217. —. “Henry Morley’s First Sketch of English Literature: Literary History as Cultural History.” Literary History/Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 17. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2001. 257-78. —. “Prominent Values in Nineteenth-Century Histories of English Literature.” Appears in: Ethics and Aesthetics: The Dissemination of Values through Literature an Other Media. Ed. Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. Stierstorfer, Klaus. Konstruktion literarischer Vergangenheit: Die Englische Literaturgeschichte von Warton bis Courthope and Ward. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. find

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