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Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peter D. McDonald
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Abstract

The continuing fallout from the theory wars, evident not least in the nostalgic after-theory narrative that is still in vogue, has dissipated critical energy in contemporary literary studies. Rejecting that narrative, this essay calls for a review of the legacy of theory and the polemical oppositions that set it against other scholarly enterprises, like book history. In particular, it suggests that the theoretical interrogation of the category of literature in the past forty years fruitfully intersects with book history's investigation of the material conditions of literary production, opening up new possibilities for literary historiography, while also imposing new demands on it. The essay identifies two traditions of antiessentialist thought (the skeptical and the enchanted), considers the ontology of the printed literary text, and examines the legacies of, among others, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu. (PDMcD)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 1: Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature , January 2006 , pp. 214 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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