Victorian(ist) "Whiles" and the Tenses of Historicism

TLDR: In this article, the authors present a collection of flashpoints along the line that divides literature from history: the nature and sufficiency of evidence, the role of language and metaphor, the power of narrative, the relation between truth and fiction, the validity of casual explanations, and the possibilities and limitations of the archive.

Abstract: �� ��� This essay is a response to three events in my professional life that unfolded together in 2003 and 2004: finishing my first archivally based book; planning and facilitating a conference called “Disciplinary Flashpoints” that was built around conversations between literary scholars and historians about the emotionally charged boundaries of their disciplines; and teaching an English department writing workshop for third-year graduate students who were all, in their various ways, absorbing the pressure—perhaps even the imperative—to “historicize” their work. All three of these activities involved becoming familiar with what might be called interdisciplinary—but what might more simply be called disciplinary—debates about the imaginary but institutionally powerful line that divides “literature” from “history.” Some of the flashpoints along that line have been addressed for at least twenty years by scholars working in both disciplines: the nature and sufficiency of evidence, the role of language and metaphor, the power of narrative, the relation between truth and fiction, the validity of casual explanations, and the possibilities and limitations of the archive. My project in this essay remains in touch with all of these flashpoints, and with the rich tradition of rhetorical analysis within the theory and philosophy of history, but with its own particular emphases. I am interested, first, in how people who study literature write about history and, second, in the rhetorical gestures that accommodate, submit to, resist, and self-authorize in relation to something called the histori