Joel Childers proposes that the critical reception of Sanskrit texts in Britain and Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century is fundamental to the ongoing practice of literary historicism. The widespread categorization of such texts by European critics as “allegorical” enabled interpretations of Sanskrit poetry as concealing knowledge instrumental to the development of history as a meaningful term of art. Neither existing narratives of Orientalism nor scholarly accounts of allegory have sufficiently appreciated this fact. This paper presents a theory of allegory in the period as a newly racialized aesthetic suited to the philosophical interests of Romantic historicism. It links this historicism to debates in the present concerned with questions of affective attachment and critical depth: it queries what scholars’ investment in critique and postcritique today owe to a pivotal moment in British colonialism, where reading poetry and knowing history were taken as indistinct labors of love. A chief exhibit is William Jones’s “On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India” (1784), in which Jones allegorically interprets an episode from the Bhagavata Purana as evidence of the Mosaic account of the Biblical flood. In his effort to read allegorically, Jones produces his own allegory, that he calls “history.” The paper concludes by considering how Jones’s “allegory of reading” underwrites our own (post-) critical historicisms.
Samuel Baker takes up the problem of causation in historical narratives of probability with an emphasis on the role of imagination in construing how things might be otherwise, partly drawing on the work of Judea Pearl. This paper deploys Pearl’s model of a causal revolution to frame some recent and not-so-recent initiatives in the historiography of Romanticism, the literary mode most associated with imagination, counterfactual thinking, and revolutionary action. It reconsiders Frances Ferguson’s brief for philosophical realism in Romantic studies, recasting her view of the Lovejoy/Wellek debate in terms of Pearl’s idea of the necessary supplementation of data gathering with causal analysis, and in relation to Stanley Fish’s contemporaneous strictures on data-driven literary criticism. Detouring through a neighboring subfield, it then considers the Victorianist Catherine Gallagher’s account of counterfactualism, in conjunction with her program for New Historicism. Finally, the paper relates Ted Underwood’s metahistory of periodization to his use of data mining and curation for literary-historical model making. Throughout, the argument will be animated by a sense that considering causation has generally been something Romanticists remember to do, even when the ascendant view has been that they shouldn’t. Brief concluding remarks about Walter Scott’s novel of the Protectorate, Woodstock, extend these ideas of Romanticism back to the Romantics themselves.
Yoon Sun Lee will interrogate a number of issues around our understanding of the contemporaneous and the possibilities of agency, as they have been broached in Romantic criticism of recent decades, a period inaugurated, roughly, by James Chandler’s England in 1819. For Althusser, “the union of humanism and historicism represents the gravest temptation, for it procures the great theoretical advantages, at least in appearance.” One apparent advantage lay in the enhanced model of agency offered by Sartre’s blend of existentialism with historical materialism. In the new formalism that has emerged in response to new historicism, one can also see an attempt to seize a renewed sense of agential power, whether that be attributed to the text, form, network, or reader. But historicism, as envisioned by Walter Benjamin, renounces or questions such impulses; it questions the idea that a slice of time, period, or context exists otherwise than as a contingent, vanishing configuration. The paper will analyze the tensions between humanist and non- or anti-humanist historicism as they appear in Romantic historicism(s) as critical practice and object of study.
The introduction will be brief, 1 minute max. Panelists will be asked to speak for no longer than 19 minutes, leaving a good 15 minutes for discussion. Our panel has a mix of established and junior scholars.