Literary Historiography Essay

The twentieth century constantly grappled with the idea of literary history, and the ambition it entailed, as an attempt to explain the laws governing the evolution of literature, the coherence of literary periodization, the inter-linkages and exchanges between genres with reference to either the movement of history as an ever-present backdrop or in reference to formal aspects of the literary system itself. The last decades of the century threw this ambition into disarray. Positivist literary historiography claimed a certain degree of objectivity, valorized a group of writers and texts, created problematic distinctions such as popular and mass literature and foregrounded the dominance of certain genres in certain periods among other questionable

The production of any kind of knowledge entails, literary historiography is no different, either a complicity in the maintenance, perpetuation of the socio-political status quo or an active intervention against it. The project of literary historiography in the eighteenth century and for a good part of the nineteenth century, when the discipline naturalized itself, was a period when the nation was in the process of being imagined. The creation of literary canons as embodiments of the cultural values of a specific group, community or nation was critical to this enterprise of nation building. However, the fracture of the meta-narrative brought about by the revolutionary ideas of post-structuralism that have exposed the textuality of history has made us question the possibility of complete knowledge. The discipline of literary historiography too has had to redefine itself, its aims and its methodology in this

This conception of history as a set of unrepeatable, closed events that could be transparently recorded has come under duress in the 20th century. The alternative approach to literary historiography, as pursued by the formalists, bent the stick in the absolute other direction by attempting to explain the evolution of literature not through historical context but by the consideration of the literary system as a relatively autonomous sphere governed by its own set of rules. The formalist experiment attempted to dehistoricize, while simultaneously, attempting to restore coherence and order to the literary system. The concept of defamiliarization attempted to explain literary evolution as a constant series of renewals based on the rejection of past forms that are displaced by new forms. Such a method, while having its own merits in certain contexts, doesn’t explain the full spectrum of questions such as the strong persistence of certain genres across time and the co-existence of diverse genres in the same historical moment. It further disturbs our notions of periodization usually based on historical events such as the beginning or the end of a monarch’s