Nineteenth-century historians and critics attacked the works of their Enlightenment predecessors as dry, abstract, and overly rational, yet eighteenth-century authors also placed considerable stress on the need for emotional involvement in the reading of history. Using the idea of historical distance, this essay shows that two forms of distance operated in the historical works of this period. On cognitive grounds, Enlightenment historians were committed to a theory of explanation that demanded considerable abstraction. In affective terms, however, the moral psychology of Hume, Smith, and Kames emphasized that history's potential for moral instruction depends on the writer's ability to reduce emotional distance. Actuality rather than exemplarity became the watchword of historical narration as readers were invited to appreciate history in ways that were strongly influenced by the contemporary culture of sensibility.

When scholars heed the “historicist turn” in literary criticism, invariably they try to situate a work in its relevant context. Doing so seems to confirm the work's social significance and its relation to proximate historical events. But what happens when a work dissolves these implied connections, rendering them provisional or meaningless? Is it evading context or pointing intelligently to that phenomenon's limited powers of determinism? This essay reconsiders whether contexts help or hinder understanding of especially antirealist fiction. What escapes context, I argue, alternately transfigures and defamiliarizes experience, thereby complicating our relation to the past.

Shakespeare's Henry V explores historiographic moments—relations among past, present, and future in memory, writing, and action. Advantage, Shakespeare's early capitalist term for highest return from least outlay, links historiography to war work, theater work, and love, theorized as “affective labor.” The play figures history not so much as fiction but rather in Walter Benjamin's terms as an achievement depending on the epistemic reliability of disadvantaged historians in danger, who rescue or recruit the dead and maximize affect. Falstaff's reported death reveals, through his friends' dispute about his dying words, Elizabethan and contemporary issues of history and shows lowliest characters with an unofficial authority appropriated also by Shakespeare's epilogue. In the controversial final scene, in which Henry woos the defeated French princess, circumstances and subtle conversational play show the labor of potential love—or hate. Henry is less successful, Catherine less victimized than they are usually interpreted to be, as she becomes the underdog Henry was before his victory, her body as mother in potentia constituting a dangerous future counterhistory and means by which domination may be dominated.

The self-abnegating, even self-flagellating, virtue promoted by the protagonist of Diderot's Le fils naturel is a function not of the text's incest plot, as critics have traditionally asserted it to be, but of the drama's colonialist subtext. This essay highlights the involvement of the play's aging patriarch, Lysimond, in the slave-based commerce of the West Indies and suggests that the old man's son, Dorval, preaches a strict and selfless brand of morality in order to overwrite this shameful aspect of his family history. If, in the end, Dorval and his kinfolk prove unable to commemorate and celebrate their supposedly virtuous birthright, this result is due to the abiding, irrepressible specter of Lysimond's colonialist transgressions.

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

Although it is known that Heine attended Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history and became involved with the Hegelian-inflected “science of Judaism” just before beginning the Reisebilder, little attention has been given to Heine's early engagement with Hegelian ideas in his travel writings. This essay argues that Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the North Sea poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegel's geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegel's philosophy of history by exposing the metaphors on which the philosophy's progressive development relies.

Critics' imagining of Victorian history has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogies. Yet Foucault's famous account of modern discipline is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its “liberal” disdain for state interference. Discipline and Punish offered a mid-1970s response to Marxist dilemmas and to the problems of twentieth-century welfare states. In the early 1980s, Foucault discerned the resurgence of liberal economic ideologies, including neo-Victorian beliefs in free trade, self-help, and laissez-faire. Foucault's later essays on today's neoliberal “governmentality” therefore provide better critical tools for the study of nineteenth-century Britain than does Discipline and Punish. Literature offers a key context for this reimagined history. Works by self-consciously progressive writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Stuart Mill elucidate a distinctive liberal quandary: the quest for a modern governing or “pastoral” agency that would be rational, all-embracing, and effective but also antibureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory.

This article reads the work of F. W. Maitland, a foundational figure in medieval legal scholarship, as an extended meditation on the theory and practice of writing history. Because Maitland's scholarship not only occupies a central place in two disciplines (law and history) but also negotiates the competing demands of an older, narrative form of historiography and the newer, scientific discourses of sociology and anthropology, his writing illustrates the persistence of certain epistemological and methodological questions. In particular, it reveals a deep interest in the modes through which history is figured. Recognizing that history is epistemologically constructed through and by tropes—metaphor, metonymy, analogy—each with its own conceptual and practical logic, Maitland turns to a notion of metaphoric history to productively sustain the tension between the abstract and the concrete, the whole and the part, that haunts nineteenth-century history writing.

Let me begin with a confession. I accepted Tilottama Rajan and Linda Woodbridge's invitation to take part in this panel less from an eagerness to talk about history and its imagining, though I will certainly get to them, than from an eagerness to talk about a particular text. That text, as described in its lengthy original title, is “A Discourse Written by One Miles Philips Englishman, One of the Company Put on Shoare Northward of Panuco, in the West Indies by M. John Hawkins 1568. Conteining Many Special Things of That Countrey and of the Spanish Government, but Specially of Their Cruelties Used to Our Englishmen, and amongst the Rest to Him Selfe for the Space of 15. or 16. Yeres Together, until by Good and Happy Meanes He Was Delivered from Their Bloody Hands, and Returned to His Owne Countrey. An. 1582” (Philips 398).

Michel de Certeau thinks about reading as an archaic practice: “Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else … despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174). Embedded in Certeau's romanticization of reading is a history of how Egypt has been read: as wealth to be plundered, as endlessly available texts, as the ruin of time. Pose against this lostness Friedrich Nietzsche's contention that all philosophy is just Egyptianism, the nostalgia for and reification of a past tense without a dynamic sense of history, so many “conceptual mummies” (35). Nietzsche reminds us to consider not lost origins but the possibility of endings, not the loss of history but its death—not death in the sense of apocalypse as Percy Bysshe Shelley's “now” and the release of new time in Prometheus Unbound but death as the archaic, the ruin, the mute, as Egypt's lost “now” and the end stop of archaic time. I will pursue the problems of the archaic, poetic ground, and translative readings Romantically through Hegel's Egyptianized account of aesthetic practices, for Nietzsche's post-Romantic Egyptianism mummifies thought. Although Hegel's Egyptianizing also concerns the dead matter of the past, his account renders that matter as dynamic. His revivification of the archaic Romantically accounts for its contaminative potential as a mysterious text whose translation can unearth a curse, and/or a promise, for the new.

About thirty-five years ago, my professor in a course on seventeenth-century english social history began with the following. “You may have heard,” he said, “that the reading list for this course has not changed since I took it here in 1924.” Here he paused. “But I can assure you that it has changed”—he paused again, and added, sotto voce—“however imperceptibly.” These words have long seemed emblematic for me of the pride felt by much of the historical profession in the continuity of its essential practices. I do not mean, of course, that historians have not embraced new groups of people, adopted a much wider array of ideological stances, and above all invented a researchable historicity for many things that had never before seemed to have a history. All this innovation is splendid, and the finest products of academic history constitute a rich and admirable body of work. But in the essential practices, especially the practice of reading—the basic relation of reader with language and imagination—change is, shall we say, hardly perceptible. It seems that the charge that historians are professionally taught not to read is almost as true now as it was two decades ago when Dominick LaCapra made it (339). But if we are to learn about the historical imagination, histories need to be read and academic historians need to be reminded from time to time that what they do is as subject to the formative pressures of discourse as any other precinct of the world of words.

Various ghosts have haunted this special topic. Caroline Weber's essay conjures the ghosts of slaves in Denis Diderot's Le fils naturel. Kari Lokke explores the way Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand deploy tales of contact with the spirits of the dead to probe a nation's political unconscious, enlisting the dead to galvanize the present into revolutionary action. For Todd Samuel Presner, Hegel's grand sweep of world history is haunted by the ghosts of Jews written out of that history. That PMLA in its special topics has not always wanted to listen to the Spirit of Literature Past is unsurprising, for the desire to listen to history's ghosts is by no means universal.