Volume 2, Number 4 · April 2, 1964
The Limits of Literary History
By Steven Marcus
English Literature, 1815-1832 (Volume X in The Oxford History of English Literature)
by Ian Jack
Oxford, 500 pp., $10.00
Who does not recall, as a student, having been assigned to read certain large sections in volumes of 'literary history.' One opened those heavy tomes—their multiple authors running down along the spines like a series of professorial hiccoughs—with a sense of dread and read through them in a thickening twilight of stupefaction and intellectual melancholy. If this is what literature was, then why should anyone have an interest in it? But literature was not like this, one knew, and so one staggered on through David Hartley's influence on The Prelude (it may have been larger than Wordsworth's), tripped over a poem called Whistle-craft, which kept being proposed as the chief cause of Byron's Don Juan, and in the end did one's best both to remember that one had done this reading and to forget what one had read.
Review, 2132 words
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