Literary History

Author / Editor
Justice, Steven.

Title
Literary History

Published
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 199-214.

Description
Justice explores "historicism's liabilities" and their consequences for the prospects of an aesthetic "turn." Traces the interactions between historicism and "theory" in debunking formalism and comments on this process in medieval studies, particularly Chaucer studies. Calls for a "fully literary history," one attentive to "what is made and received as 'the literary' in a given historical moment," anchored in a substantial "conception of poetic form," and capable of adjudicating between a specifically literary history and those histories that subordinate literature to politics, economics, or institutional change.

Alternative Title
Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches.

Chaucer Subjects
Background and General Criticism.