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3 - The French Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
David Simpson
Edited by
Marshall Brown
Marshall Brown
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

Literary and cultural history is a hard task to pursue under the tutelage of postmodernity. Grand or master narratives are now discouraged, so that no one can any longer confidently propose Hegelian sequences describing the organic unfolding of events through time, or the immanent relation between phenomena within time, in the manner of the traditional Geistesgeschichte. The prevailing admonitions commonly appear as moralexhortations, telling us that to proliferate grand narratives is repressive and reprehensible. But the difficulties are also and even more exigently epistemological: how do we know how one thing is connected with another within a history or a culture? What does it mean to speak, as Hazlitt and many others did, of the ‘spirit of the age’? How can one prevent even the simplest of little narratives from escalating into something grander, whether by tacit assumption or empirical accretion? Perhaps the safest literary history is once again the most traditional: that showing the influence of one writer or writing upon another, with citations in place and cases closed. But it is hard to restrict ourselves to this kind of literary history because we still inherit an Enlightenment disposition to do so much more, to explore and explain the inherence of literature and literary criticism to culture and history on the grandest scale.

What we call the French Revolution has functioned from the first both as an instance of and an apparent solution to this problem of cause and effect in culture and history. Unlike many other ‘revolutions’ whose presence marks the narratives of historians and critics – agricultural, industrial, demographic, consumer and so on – the French Revolution seems to have had a clear beginning in 1789 and an end by 1815 if not before.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 49 - 71
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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