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The Impossible Genre: Reading Comprehensive Literary History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert Johnstone
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Abstract

Recent comprehensive literary histories affirm their own impossibility, a gesture that once belonged to opponents of the genre. The challenge of “the impossible whole,” of course, has always influenced the design of histories of entire literary traditions, but the open avowal that the form is a project of the cultural imagination has several notable consequences. In this new understanding, for example, the histories of a given tradition answer to and provoke rather than supersede one another in sequence. Literary works cease to be pseudoevents listed to achieve the appearance of a full history; they dematerialize, and the literary historian uses their instability to maintain the discomfiting question of the relations among “history,” “literature,” and “nation.” For these reasons, the impossible genre will remain a medium of choice, and of controversy, as long as the current academic and public debate over textual, authorial, and cultural identities continues to rage.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Theory of Literary History , January 1992 , pp. 26 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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