Rethinking Literary History

This collection of six essays by major scholars reconsiders various aspects of literary history, focused around key questions in contemporary literary theory such as the idea of nations and nationalism, racial memory, and colonialism and postcolonialism. Some twenty years ago, at the time that the influence of poststructuralist theory became predominant in literary theory, traditional literary history was pushed to the margins by critiques of its teleological assumptions and uncritical acceptance of Eurocentric ideologies. In Rethinking Literary History, six major scholars, practising literary historians and literary theorists, revisit literary history, deploying the strategies developed in literary and cultural studies over the past two decades. The authors provide synoptic and wide-ranging discussions of each particular issue and the interchange between the various authors in which they reflect on, argue with, and "rethink" each other's formulations reinforces the dialogic structure of the volume.