Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature The “Old” Extrinsic View (“Old” Historicism) History is “objective”; i.e., history really happened and the truth of the past is objectively recoverable. This historical truth controls, informs, governs, determines, conditions, limits, circumscribes—maybe even produces—what a given literary text from a particular era can or can’t be understood to be saying. History, in other words, is the factual, empirical foundation or background to literature, the objective standard against which any interpretation has to be measured. Literature, by contrast, is a mere “reflection” of this objective reality, a fictional representation or expression of the age in which it was written. History produces literature, and we read literature for the light it sheds on a particular historical age or the “worldview” of that age (or—insofar as biography is a sort of personal history—a window into the minds of the Great Men who define the age). Tillyard is representative of this kind of thinking: We know X about Milton; therefore we can conclude that “Lycidas” means Y.

Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature Problems with/objections to the “Old” Extrinsic View (“Old” Historicism) The main problem is that it effectively turns literature into a watered-down, second-hand version of history (or biography). If literature is only a “reflection” of a historical reality, an “effect” of a historical cause, then as Patterson says on 251: “‘literature’ could never say anything that ‘history’ had not authorized.” And so…the “inevitable reaction against this privileging of the historical”: 

Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature The Intrinsic View (Formalism/Intrinsic Criticism [including the “New” Criticism of the 1940s]) The study of literature should focus on things which are internal to the literary text, things that are unique and inherent to literature (tone, diction, figurative language, sound effects, imagery & symbolism, character, setting, plot, theme, structure, pattern & repetition, tension & ambiguity, generic conventions, etc., etc.) Literature is largely an enclosed, self-referential system; an “order of words” (Northrop Frye) with no necessary correspondence to the world beyond the page. (And if a literary work seems to refer to an external reality, that’s an illusion.) A work of literature is independent of history. In fact, it transcends any specific historical moment, since it’s concerned with Bigger Things—the Enduring, Universal Themes of Human Nature and so on.

Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature Problems with/objections to the Intrinsic View In practice, it’s hard to discuss things like setting or theme without reference to a world outside the text. But also (255-6): it “mystifies” and/or “aestheticizes” literature; makes it difficult to see how both the production and consumption of literature are themselves social practices that have different meanings in different cultures (or even at different times and/or for different people in the same society).

Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature And so history comes “roaring” back into literary study (in the form of “New” Historicism) “New” historicists aren’t inclined to see any inherent, ontological difference between “factual” and “fictional,” literary and non-literary, texts: both literary and historical (journalistic, documentary, etc.) texts are narratives which employ similar techniques to construct or represent something in words.

Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature And so history comes “roaring” back into literary study (in the form of “New” Historicism) “New” historicists aren’t inclined to see any inherent, ontological difference between “factual” and “fictional,” literary and non-literary, texts: both literary and historical (journalistic, documentary, etc.) texts are narratives which employ similar techniques to construct or represent something in words. History, therefore, isn’t a set of objective facts that “grounds” literature, or that literature “reflects” (and must therefore “measure up to” in some way)...

Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature And so history comes “roaring” back into literary study (in the form of “New” Historicism) “New” historicists aren’t inclined to see any inherent, ontological difference between “factual” and “fictional,” literary and non-literary, texts: both literary and historical (journalistic, documentary, etc.) texts are narratives which employ similar techniques to construct or represent something in words. History, therefore, isn’t a set of objective facts that “grounds” literature, or that literature “reflects” (and must therefore “measure up to” in some way)... The relationship between literary text and social/historical context is not one of foreground & background or “mirror” and reality; it’s more like a web in which many different kinds of texts—media texts, pop culture texts, high-culture texts, documentary texts, everyday social practices—influence and interact with each other to create a “larger social formation” (Patterson 260), a “discourse.”

Ways of Conceiving of the Relationship Between History and Literature And so history comes “roaring” back into literary study (in the form of “New” Historicism) “New” historicists aren’t inclined to see any inherent, ontological difference between “factual” and “fictional,” literary and non-literary, texts: both literary and historical (journalistic, documentary, etc.) texts are narratives which employ similar techniques to construct or represent something in words. History, therefore, isn’t a set of objective facts that “grounds” literature, or that literature “reflects” (and must therefore “measure up to” in some way)... The relationship between literary text and social/historical context is not one of foreground & background or “mirror” and reality; it’s more like a web in which many different kinds of texts—media texts, pop culture texts, high-culture texts, documentary texts, everyday social practices—influence and interact with each other to create a “larger social formation” (Patterson 260), a “discourse.” A fictional text like Catcher isn’t a “product” of postwar America, and it doesn’t just “reflect” certain themes of mid-century American life; rather, it plays an active part in composing those themes. “Literary production is itself a form of social practice: texts do not merely reflect social reality but create it.”