29/10/07 - English Literature - Romanticism and Historicism

Historicism usually means some account of human society that believes it is changing fundamentally in some way over time. History proceeds in such a way that each period will have its own history, historical circumstances and events. Historicism also refers to types of practice that see the location of a text in a particular historical moment as fundamental to its meaning.

Neoclassical culture refuted the first definition of historicism, for it saw that history was just a repeat of itself, that all civilisations are basically versions of Roman civilisation. In moving beyond medieval social organisation, a neoclassical ‘Renaissance’ imagines itself as returning to what had come before: to classical culture and values.

Enlightenment thinking about society was more radically historicist. According to the 'stadial' history of David Hume, Adam Smith and William Robertson, societies are shaped by their mode of existence. These are hunting, herding, agriculture and commerce progressively. These modes of existence refer to particular stages in history, with commerce being the most advanced and hunting the most primitive. These modes, determined by their stage in history, in turn determine social, political and especially legal institutions.

In moving beyond the medieval, characterised in terms of superstition and feudal oppression, the ‘Enlightenment’ imagines itself mediating the emergence of quite a new type of society, based on commercial and scientific reason. The object of property came to mean money, rather than land. The Enlightenment was linked to a limited monarchy system of government. This materialistic concept of history is not about ideas but impersonal advancement. This theory discounts religion and other concepts. Instead, the necessary conclusion of the theory is that human nature, i.e. feeling, imagination and consciousness, remains the same throughout history.

In Waverley, Walter Scott describes Tully-Veolan in agricultural terms; in terms of a pre-capitalist culture. In the novel, Edward travels through history as he travels geographically, moving from agricultural to pastoral systems of government. As retrospective readers, we know that the pastoral system is doomed because society must necessarily develop and move away from this system. The Jacobites must decline. Nevertheless, there is something human-like persisting through this progression. There is the idea that human nature is consistent and able to be preserved, for example in Ossian, despite social changes.

According to Hugh Blair, it is possible to access the poetry and art of 'primitive' cultures, yet these cultures are able to express the aspects of human nature better than the 'modern' society. This informs the ideal of 'aesthetic' as being apart from politics, religion and other mundane things. Poetry is higher than systems of society because it has not been shaped by processes of modernity. It represents uncorrupted and unchanged human emotion. The role of the past in novels conveys the same idea. For example, in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Catherine's idea of an abbey is the instance of modern subjectivity of someone brought up in a modern society fantasising about the past in a particularly aesthetic way. Ruined abbeys are associated with superstition, Roman power and monarchical power, yet it has been made available to Catherine in a positive aesthetic term of sublime. Access to the past gives her a certain fear. The ruined abbey transcends political and economic change to be made available for aesthetic perception and experience.

In the eighteenth century the French revolution looked like an imaginative reaction, the reversal of cyclable history. However, absolute change occurred rather than a repetition of the old pattern. It was without precedent. It cannot be explained by materialistic or economic reasons. Hegel argued that history works in the exact opposite way to the theories proposed by the Scottish Enlightenment. For Hegel, history is the way in which human consciousness develops in itself and its relation to the world, driving the economic, political and social realm. He named this geist, which refers to a continually changing perception of the world which drives yet more changes. It is idealist, because it is ideas that change history rather than material things.

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" presents two problems: firstly, place, and secondly, time. The poem is not about Tintern Abbey at all, for there is no description of the ruins themselves. It is about consciousness rather than a particular place. The location of the poet as he writes the poem does not matter. The natural scenery described in the poem is not simple fact, but the media through which the poet experiences the supernatural.

"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore I am still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
[Wordsworth, "Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," 1798, lines 88-111]

The absence of a particularised scene does not matter because the poem is about supernatural spirit. So why did Wordsworth name the poem "Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"? Wordsworth is proposing a recovery of spirituality that has been threatened by the modern conceptions that led to demolishing the abbey. The abbey is a spiritual place, stripped of Christian meaning and given aesthetic meaning instead: a post-Enlightenment spirituality. Human emotion cannot be disguised in the same way as economic change. History is transcended; the mind is not trapped into its historical and social context. The poet's mind is free to range over any history. The poem is therefore outside of history. It is a similar view of history to Hegel's, but for Wordsworth the changes take place in his mind, rather than in fact. So why did Wordsworth tell us the date (July 13 1798) is the poem transcends history? July 14 was the fourth anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the anniversary of King Louis' loss of control over the kingdom of France. The consideration of Britain's role in the world is placed in the poem.

"Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone."
[14-22]

By the word "uncertain" the poet claims he does not know where the smoke comes from. But in fact, he does. It comes from charcoal-burning for the nearby ironworks. The valleys around Tintern Abbey ar laden with poor people in the middle of an economic crisis, looking for work. What Wordsworth sees is the historical problem he is trying to deal with by looking for a transcendent ideal elsewhere in history. While Wordsworth tries to dehistoricise his poem to make it transcend the fickleness of time, he paradoxically historicises it.

New Historicism takes one poem and juxtaposes it with another poem, attempting to shed light on both of them. Alternatively, Marxist approaches involve an intellectual context. Marx targeted Hegel by taking his version of historical progression and turning it upside down: Marx says that material change affects consciousness, consciousness does not change the material. For Marx even human nature is not constant; it must change. It cannot escape its historical context. He cannot quite see that consciousness must be able to detach itself in order to make his own kind of writing possible, to allow him to step outside his world and describe and contrast different types of history.

Raymond Williams pointed out the problems with the terminology of history, which originated in the meaning of "literature" and "culture", as the conception of these ideas also changed over time. Their meaning is different now when we use them to refer to things in the past, when their meaning was something else.