Xref: murdoch uva.engl.amstdsma:95 Newsgroups: uva.engl.amstdsma Path: murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!abh9h From: abh9h@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (Alan B. Howard) Subject: CLAUSSEN Message-ID: Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: uva Date: Thu, 15 Sep 1994 22:32:44 GMT "National Literatures" in English: Toward a New Paradigm Christopher Clausen THE CONCEPT OF "national literatures" in English has outlived its usefulness and should be abandoned, both as a way of thinking about literary history and as a way of organizing curricula. Whatever evaluation one makes of them as political phenomena, the nationalisms that gave rise successively to the concept of a distinctly British literature, then an American literature, and now Australian, Canadian, and a host of what are often described equivocally as "new literatures," constitute a barrier to clear thinking about what has long since become an international enterprise carried on in many cultural settings. As the medium that defines the horizon of intelligibility, language is a more principled and useful (though not absolute) basis than nationality for distinguishing one literature from another. To define English literature as "literature in the English language, no matter where or by whom written" rejoins conceptually what has been artificially fragmented, makes possible a genuine multiculturalism in English literary studies, entitles writers who are neither British nor American to more widespread attention, and helps us think more fruitfully about literary relations among authors, literary movements, societies, and periods. For nearly a hundred and fifty years a majority of the people who speak English as their native language have lived outside Europe. Not since the seventeenth century has English literature been only the literature of the British Isles. A powerful case can be made that during the twentieth century literature produced in Britain ceased to be the most important limb of what has often been called a tree of many branches, watered from a variety of sources. Cultural nationalists in former colonies have frequently objected to the tree metaphor, pointing out that a tree has only one trunk and arises from a single plot of ground. Let us therefore say that literature in English is now a thoroughly hybridized stock with roots in many soils. The idea that the literary world has a single center from which normative standards andjudgments emanate looks not just outdated but quaint. Overlooking the international character of a strain that has mutated so profusely merely disguises, in the name of nationalism, the new phenomenon of a worldwide literature that is the product of no single culture yet exhibits inescapable family resemblances, reciprocal borrowings and influences too intimate for the claim of separateness to be really plausible. Two factors have made those mutually enriching borrowings and influences more pronounced in the twentieth century than ever before: improved communications and the phenomenon of the international writer, the T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Lowry, Salman Rushdie, or Janette Turner Hospital who can be fitted only imperfectly into a single nation's literary heritage. The decline of the imperial structures that originally spread the English language over so much of the earth's surface has increased the incidence of such national ambiguities, not reduced them. The fact that some writers are conscious nationalists has no bearing on the question of how the literature to which those writers belong should be conceived, or how the discipline that studies them should be organized. Looked at from a supranational point of view, the nationalism of some English-speaking writers is less striking for its own sake than for the extreme similarity of their ways of being nationalists. Literary nationalism in English is itself an international phenomenon that follows its own predictable laws. To assert that literature in English is more profitably conceived as a variegated whole than subdivided along national lines is not to minimize the importance to a writer or reader of living in a specific place, a particular nation, or a distinct culture. It is instead to say that such differences are fluid, ambiguous, and most fruitfully studied by comparison rather than exclusion. Despite the common practices of American literary study, for example, we might learn more about Emily Dickinson's poems by comparing them with those of Christina Rossetti, her British contemporary, than by measuring them against Walt Whitman's or by wondering obsessively what relation they have to the Civil War. A persuasive case can be made for studying Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Rudyard Kipling's Kim (published sixteen years apart) together rather than as the products of two presumably discrete traditions. Authorial nationality as a context is not so much wrong--its importance for some kinds of literary understanding is indisputable--as simply too narrow to justify making it a fundamental principle of division. The claim that English literature is in a vital sense one need not deny that it is also various but proposes that the convention of dividing it along national lines exaggerates a particular kind of difference, does violence to the ways in which literary influence works, and serves purposes that need to be scrutinized rather than accepted without reflection as obvious or worthy. With the arguable exception of countries with long non-English literary traditions, such as India, any "national literature" in English has a closer relation to any other than it has to any non-English literature. In the twentieth century even the most nationally specific historical material has become international literary property. Both the Australian Thomas Keneally and the Englishman Richard Adams have written novels about the American Civil War, while the American Thomas Flanagan has published two novels about the Irish struggle for independence. Another Arnerican, Stanley Wolpert, is the author of a novel about the assassination of Gandhi that became popular in many countries. These examples could be multiplied. To define English literature as I do above may inspire a charge of "essentialism" on not one but two fronts: it may seem to claim that both literature and English are unvarying categories. No such claim is involved. For my purposes here, literature may be whatever forms of writing that literature departments are concerned with--not only novels, poems, essays, plays, but whatever hybrid or completely new forms may result from the modification of originally British literary traditions by people in different cultures with differing tastes and needs. It goes without saying that those traditions, like the English language itself, have been changing throughout their existence, and internationalization has increased both the rate and the range of innovation. Influences reach the contemporary writer in English from many sources (and through many languages) that originate outside Europe. Few writers in any period, however, make sustained literary use of more than one language. Whether by choice or necessity, a writer in English is accessible to the international audience that reads English and not, except in translation, to any other. Moreover, there is little sign that the forms of written English employed in different countries are likely to become mutually unintelligible. Such a development would after all defeat the advantages of using English in the first place, which are commercial and political as well as literary. So long as writers in English continue to use what is recognizably the same language, local variations--whether in England, America, India, or Africa--enrich rather than obstruct the network of intelligibility that transmits such benefits (literary and otherwise) to them and to their readers. II In Britain as in other European countries, the concept of a "national literature" arose in the context of nineteenth-century nationalism. Fortuitously, the professional study of nonclassical literatures took shape in universities at about the same time. The result was nearly inevitable: literary curricula were delineated according to nationalistic assumptions that, when examined today, look philosophically dubious and thoroughly old-fashioned. From the start, the notion of a national literature was subject to the same ambiguities as the idea of the nation itself in its murky relation to a race or state, but they seem not to have reduced its power as a model.l The surprising thing is that scholars in subsequent ages of literary study, even one that boasts of its theoretical sophistication and denounces ethnocentrism at every opportunity, have largely taken the original nineteenth-century assumptions for granted by extending a new place within the old pattern (and sometimes within the curriculum) to each new nation as it came into existence. Seldom has the continuing intellectual power of nationalism been so well illustrated. In 1873, Henry Morley's popular A First Sketch of English Literature described the relationship between English literature and English nationality in explicit terms: "The literature of this country has for its most distinctive mark the religious sense of duty. It represents a people striving through successive generations to find out the right and do it, to root out the wrong and labour ever onward for the love of God. If this be really the strong spirit of her people, to show that it is so is to tell how England won, and how alone she can expect to keep, her foremost place among the nations."2 While the religious emphasis strikes a note that must have sounded archaic even to many contemporary readers, the sense that a nation's literature embodies its own distinct moral outlook in a unified way has often been echoed in other countries. In describing the relation of this idea to the rise of English literature as a field of study in English universities, Stefan Collini calls the result "the Whig interpre- tation of English literature" and declares: A constitutive feature of the Whig interpretation of English political history was the insistence on unbroken continuity, and it is noticeable how strongly this same claim was pressed for the nation's literary past.... A further important property of the type of narratives to which, generically, "Whig" interpretations belong is that they can order the relevant past in terms of currently prevailing values. Thus, the characterization of the informing spirit of the national literature was subject to constant adjustment depending upon the particular scale of moral values to which it had to be accommodated, and it should be no surprise that in the late nineteenth century English literature was alleged to display ... character, manliness, duty, and altruism.... Thereafter, it is clear that the very establishment of separate courses in English literature at the end of the century in part reflected an increased national selfconsciousness. (359-62) The First World War, with its perceived threat to the nation itself, hardened this conception of the "national literature" by requiring "the expression of an aggressive nationalism (again overwhelmingly English rather than British or imperial), and the men of letters and the literary professoriat were not slow to make their contribution here. The canon of English literature was mobilized to serve the nation's cause" (364). The concept of literature as a weapon was not a British innovation; by reconceiving its literature in this nationalistic fashion before and during the war, Britain was simply following the lead of Germany and France. Similar patterns have been repeated in other countries, both European and postcolonial, during the last hundred years. Once British literature came to be seen in nationalist terms, it became probable that the same paradigm would be applied every time another Englishspeaking country wished to free itself from British domination. The founding of American literature as a distinct field of study echoes the same notes in a similar idiom, perhaps because it occurred almost contemporaneously. Fred Lewis Pattee, the first officially titled professor of American literature, published a history of his subject in 1896 that went through many editions and helped popularize it in schools and universities. The first sentences of his introduction defined literature in terms that had already become conventional: "The literature of a nation is the entire body of literary productions that has emanated from the people of the nation during its history, preserved by the arts of writing and printing. It is the embodiment of the best thoughts and fancies of a people."3 After discussing the factors that influenced a nation's literature in a vocabulary based on Hippolyte Taine's famous trinity of race, milieu, and moment, Pattee went on to defend the existence of a distinct American literature: The term a literature may be defined as "all the literary productions in a given language." By this definition English literature would embrace all the writings that have emanated from the race [sic] speaking the English language. The writings of America would, therefore, be only a branch drawing life from the great trunk of English letters. But this is not so. It is now generally admitted that the literature of America has become an independent one. It is an exception, and the only exception, to the rule given above. In no other case in all history have there been two distinct literatures written in the same language. (H 3-4) The half-conscious political assumptions here are worth emphasizing. American literature has become "independent" despite its use of the English language. What does independence mean when ascribed to a literature? Simply that the United States itself is a fully independent country. The only justification Pattee thinks necessary for asserting the separateness of American literature is that "we have been for more than a century an independent nation; and we are recognized abroad not as Englishmen in America, but as a distinct type with as marked an individuality as have the English themselves" (H 4) . Considerably more is being claimed here than that writers are affected by social and political factors. In flat contradiction to his original definition of literature as based on language, Pattee ends by implying that the possession of a separate literature is a necessary and inevitable badge of political independence. Cooper, Emerson, and Whitman had urged long ago that an independent America needed writers with some independence from European influences to establish its own literary traditions. What we have in Pattee is something different: the literary historian, the shaper of curricula, who defines American literature into existence as an entity, a field of study, a national possession like a flag or a navy. The relationship between nationalism and the possession of a "distinct literature" could hardly be clearer. As in Britain, the First World War gave American cultural nationalism a sharper edge. But the continuing theoretical elaboration of American literature as something distinct took place primarily in opposition not to German but to English literature--necessarily so, because English was the only other literature under which it could plausibly be subsumed. In that respect the assertion of American literary separateness could be described as an act of secession, the first full-blown cultural rebellion against colonialism in the modern world. The nineteenth-century American literature that Pattee and more recent historians describe is a succession of attempts by writers to free themselves and their audience from dependence on English (and sometimes generically European) models, to render American experiences in innovative ways that expressed the national character and paralleled the distinctiveness of American political institutions. By the time Robert Spiller and his colleagues published the third edition of their magisterial Literary History of the United States, Pattee's general assumptions could be taken for granted rather than reargued: "American literature," they declared in the "Address to the Reader" that prefaced their three bulky volumes, "is not merely in a state of becoming. Our national history is already long enough to have had its periods of maturing and fruition."4 The application to literature of a political model of national independence and development had in effect become a matter of common sense, undefended because unchallenged. Thirty years later, even so critical an Americanist as Lawrence Buell could complain about the "cisatlantic hermeticism" with which American literature is typically studied and plead for a greater sense of its postcolonial relationship to newer literatures without fundamentally questioning the national model itself.5 When Pattee implausibly described American literature as the only exception in all history to the rule that literature is defined by language, it seems not to have occurred to him that the nationalistic logic he had used to declare American literary "independence" involved abandoning the criterion of language altogether and could easily be adopted in other colonies as they became independent. By the time he published the first edition of his history Canada had been a self-governing dominion for nearly thirty years and Australia was about to become one; both countries were already producing literary works recognizably different from anything being written in the British Isles. For writers in such countries then and later, American literature represented simultaneously a model of independent status and a potential new threat to cultural independence, not only in Canada, where the dangers of exchanging one imperial influence for another were geographically obvious, but also in places as distant as Australia. Bruce King has described the predictable twentieth-century consequences of the fact that there were now not one but two national models: The recent importance of various national English literatures is a reflection of such cultural and political developments as: the dissolution of the British Empire, the emergence of new nations, the weakening of Commonwealth ties, the increased awareness of independence in former colonies, the importance of the United States, and a general, if vaguely defined, feeling that the English cultural tradition is no longer relevant outside the British Isles or that it supports the dominance of a British- influenced elite. The break-up of our older concept of English literature, into national literatures, thus reflects the growing cultural fragmentation of the English-speaking world.6 As in Pattee and Spiller, political and cultural independence from the former colonial power implies axiomatically both the existence and the desirability of a "national literature." The model is so obvious that King seems not even to notice that his description depends on repeatedly shifting the meaning of English-using it sometimes to denote a language, sometimes to identify a country or a unitary "cultural tradition." "It is difficult to separate nationalism from the search for a native tradition," John Pengwerne Matthews observes in Tradition in Exile, his evocatively titled study of nineteenth-century Canadian and Australian poetry.7 The attempt to create new "national literatures" within the former British Empire has repeatedly led to such anomalies as Matthews describes in the case of the Australian nationalist poet Bernard O'Dowd: "The idea of Australia obsessed him as much as the idea of America had obsessed Whitman, and the American poet remains the largest single influence on his work" (T 184). Like writers and critics in many other countries before and since his time, O'Dowd equated writing about one's country from a native point of view with creating a separate literature that would symbolize the nation's new status in the world. The problem lies not in the worthiness of the first aim but in linking it with the second, particularly when one makes use of foreign models to assert one's own uniqueness. If a national literature is like a national flag, inevitably every former colony will insist on having one, whose collective unity and distinctness from every other literature must then be energetically defended. The significance of individual writers or literary works from any other point of view becomes a secondary question. The contemporary novelist Robertson Davies was for many years more highly acclaimed in Britain and America than in his own country, largely because Canadian critics found him insufficiently committed to promoting what they saw as the national identity. At the same time Hugh MacLennan, who wrote about little else, was being hailed at home as the great Canadian novelist. Literary critics and historians in such circumstances become a cultural army protecting the territory and honor of the nation. As with American literature a century ago, the separateness that must be asserted at all costs is cultural independence of the former colonial power, for in this paradigm any wavering about full literary independence would suggest limits to the nation's political independence and national character. Sometimes the priority could even be reversed: a defiantly nationalistic literature might help bring the nation back into existence as a political entity. The Ireland of Douglas Hyde and W. B. Yeats is an obvious example. Despite the fact that the notion of national character has been long discredited, the link that nineteenthcentury cultural nationalism forged between the status of the nation to which it belongs and the status of the literature that expresses it has never been broken. Below the level of the language that provides the fundamental rationale for their existence, the most important criteria by which American departments of English organize their literary curricula are nationality, period, and genre. Hence the familiarity of such course titles as Twentieth-Century British Drama, The Nineteenth-Century American Novel, Renaissance Poetry (written in a period before the specification of nationality becomes necessary), and lately New Literatures or Postcolonial Literatures, catch-all terms that have largely replaced Commonwealth Literature as ways of referring to literature in English that is neither British nor American. Similar phrases tend to define the specialties of literary scholars and therefore the way histories of literature--and the discipline itself-- are organized. Although the concept of period in particular has been much criticized, the structure as a whole has proved to be remarkably durable. The major recent exceptions to it have been courses dealing with writers who are women or members of ethnic minority groups. Even these courses are usually accommodated to the original three categories by giving them titles such as TwentiethCentury American Women Novelists or The Harlem Renaissance, in which genre is sometimes displaced by the race or sex of the authors but nationality and period remain intact. Classification according to genre appeals to intrinsic formal qualities; classification by period appeals to the power of history. Although plenty of ambiguities arise on the borderlines between genres or periods (Is Gerard Manley Hopkins a Victorian or a modern? What shall we do with closet dramas in verse?), both categories are principled in a way that nationality is not. Time in particular is a far less flexible variable than place, and the sovereignty of history over writers is correspondingly more significant than the fact of belonging to a particular nation, old or new. In the experiences that it permits and denies, the power of history seems more like the power of a language over those of its users who know no other. As we have seen, a nationalistic Australian poet in the late nineteenth century took Walt Whitman as his model. Moreover, it is one of the celebrated ironies of literary nationalism that Whitman was widely admired in England before American critics began to recognize him as a great poet. By the early twentieth century his influence was deeply felt throughout the English-speaking world and beyond it. One can say with absolute confidence, however, that despite whatever retrospective effects it may have on the ways critics read earlier poetry, Leaves of Grass exercised no influence on writers anywhere before the year 1855. It is not my purpose here to argue for or against genre and period as principles for organizing our knowledge of literature. Nor am I concerned with larger theoretical questions about the most appropriate or "natural" unit of literary study--a single poem, an author, a form, a theme, an era, or the history of culture in a grand sense-- except insofar as the nation is identified as such a unit. I want simply to make the case that accepting the principle of multiple "national literatures" in English hides more than it reveals. It elevates parochialism into an axiom of study for historical reasons that have rarely been challenged in recent criticism. Insofar as literary nationalism of the kind I am describing once served a useful purpose-- making room first for literary works in English whose authors were not British, then at a later stage for works from cultures that were neither British nor American--that purpose has been achieved. Holding onto the model in which a national literature serves as a badge of independence now actually defeats the original purpose by excessively identifying each writer with his or her own local "tradition," whether that tradition has its headquarters in London or Nairobi, Sydney or New York. In such a taxonomy, writers from large, powerful nations will inevitably be more widely read beyond (and sometimes within) their own borders than writers from nations that the world regards as less important. A surgeon does not save a limb by amputating it, and perhaps the greatest disadvantage of the existing academic paradigm is that writers who are neither British nor American are segregated into the category most often referred to at the moment as postcolonial literatures, a label that singles out for emphasis their countries' past subjection to British imperial power. Despite frequent use of a Marxist vocabulary, critics who specialize in this field tend to approve of nationalism in present or former Commonwealth countries, and the term "postcolonial literatures" has a transitional air, as though many of those who use it were awaiting the moment when full diplomatic recognition could be extended to a new cohort of national literatures. As the historical relationship that the term identifies recedes further into the past, the nationalist paradigm dictates another round of fragmentation in the way we think about literature in English.8 What would happen if we abandoned the assumption, so well stated by Pattee, that a necessary mark of success in achieving nationhood is the recognized possession of a distinct national literature, and therefore ceased to be quite so intimidated by the customs barriers dividing one country's literary accomplishments in English from another's? I can only hint briefly here at two important consequences. First, a less parochial kind of literary history would become dominant-- literary history more on the model of David Perkins's History of Modern Poetry than on that of the forthcoming Columbia History of American Poetry--with far-reaching consequences for criticism. Abandoning the national paradigm would encourage the development of more flexible and comparative models of literary-cultural interaction. The historical study of literature in English would become more broadly based, both geographically and intellectually, a direction in which a variety of new and old historicists have been fitfully moving.9 Second, English courses would look very different. Nearly everyone now agrees that "coverage" of the sort that English departments aspired to in the days when there was a smaller and more confidently fixed body of literature to be mastered has become impossible. That recognition strengthens the case for more inclusive courses. If, to take one example, effectively "covering" the twentieth-century British novel is impossible anyway, then the specialist rationale for excluding novels that are not British becomes much less persuasive. A course that reflected this discovery might enlarge the understanding of both teacher and students by finally allowing James Joyce and William Faulkner the curricular proximity that their writings demand; putting Toni Morrison in touch with Chinua Achebe; rescuing Patrick White, V. S. Naipaul, Robertson Davies, and Raja Rao from their long incarceration on the margins of a dead empire. Similarly, those of us whose field is nineteenth- century poetry might learn more and teach better if Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti were finally allowed to shed light on each other, along with Tennyson and Whitman and (perhaps) the latter's Australian disciple Bernard O'Dowd. The choices, permutations, and new perspectives opened up by this way of conceiving such a course would be nearly inexhaustible. Nothing would be lost except the illusion that by concentrating on a single nation, one can master a discrete quantum of literary tradition. Despite the ambitions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism, the idea of the nation-- whether defined as an existing state or in nineteenth-century quasi-metaphysical terms--represents no such quantum, particularly when many nations give their own inflections to the same literary language. There is no distinct national character or essence for literature to express, even if we disguise the obsoleteness of the concept by rechristening it "cultural practices." Instead there is something better: a nearly inexhaustible complex of changing cultures and polities that influence each other ceaselessly through a common medium of communication. Cultural nationalism is a stage through which scholars and critics go, frequently by necessity, in order to establish the claim of their countries' writers to respectful attention and simultaneously protect them from cultural domination by the metropolis. It ought to be a transitional rather than a final position. Least of all should it be permitted to balkanize forever a collective literary achievement and field of study that offers such extraordinary rewards to exploration as a multiethnic, multicultural whole. NOTES See, for example, H. M. Posnett, Comparative l,iterature (London, 1886), in which a chapter entitled "What Is National Literature?" points out the unsatisfactoriness of a concept (nation) that may be defined by language, government, or other factors but then asserts that "the true makers of national literature are the actions and thoughts of the nation itself" (p. 345) and seems untroubled by any ambiguities. For a contemporary critique of nineteenth-century national ideas, see Lord Acton's "Nationality" (1862) in ~elected Wrilings of Lord AcCon, ed.J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis, 1986), vol. I, esp. pp. 418-23. 2 Quoted in Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political 7`hou~ht and Intellectual Life in Britain 185(~1930 (Oxford, 1991), p. 360; hereafter cited in text. There is a large recent literature on the history of English as a discipline. Two influential examples that treat nationalism in a general way are D. J. Palmer, The Ri~e of Engli~jh Studie,s (New York, 1965) and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, 1987). 3 Fred Lewis Pattee, A Histo7y of American Literature (rev. ed., New York, 1903), p. 1; hereafter cited in text as H. 4 "Address to the Reader," Literary Histo~y of the United Stat~,s, ed. Robert Spiller et al., 3rd ed. (New York, 1963), I, xx. 5 See Lawrence Buell, "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon," American Litera7y Histo~y, 4 (1992), 413. "The pedagogy and criticism if not the personal conviction of literary Americanists still for the most part give the appearance of being driven, as Spengemann put it, by 'the idea that an appreciation of American writing depends upon our keeping it separate from the rest of the world"' (p. 414). In attempting to internationalize our understanding of the "American Renaissance," however, Buell seems to take the naturalness of "national literatures" in English for granted. 6 Editor's Introduction to Literatur~,s of the World in Engli~ih, ed. Bruce King (London, 1974), p. 2. A few years earlier the Canadian poet-critic A.J. M. Smith saw matters tending in the opposite direction. As a result of "the technological revolution that is altering the whole world," he declared, "Canadian poetry in the fifties and sixties has become more like modern poetry in the United States, England, and France, and less like Canadian poetry in the nineteenth century. The distinction that was once valid between a native and a cosmopolitan tradition has grown rapidly less significant.... If no man is an island, neither is any nation an island, even so huge and mainly an empty one as Canada" (Editor's Preface to Modern Canadian Verse in English and French, ed. A. J. M. Smith [Toronto, 1967], p. xviii). More recently the German scholar Dieter Riemenschneider, perhaps reflecting his own country's history, finds danger in the nationalist position and seeks a rather marshy middle ground: "It is perhaps obligatory to steer clear of the Scylla of the 'New English Literatures' and the Charybdis of distinct national literatures in English" (Critical Approach~,s to the New LiteraturP,s in English, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider [Essen, 1989], pp. 10-11). His alternative model divides the world into five regions and seems conceptually indebted to the Cold War system of security alliances. 7 John Pengwerne Matthews, 7radition in rxi~: A Comparative Study of ~ocial In/Zuenc~,s on th~ l)evek)pm~nt oJ`A LLstraliarl and (,anadian Poetry in the Nine~,enth C'entu~y (Toronto, 1962), p. 49; hereafter cited in text as T. 8 On nationalism and "postcolonial" cnticism, see Nation (lnd Na1r~tion, ed. Homi K Bhabha (London, 1990), esp. ch. 8, "Literature--N~tionalism's Other?" by Simon Dunng. For an up- to~ate theoretical account of the whole field, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Gnffiths, and Helen Tif~ln, 7`he l~`mpire Writes Back (London, 1989). 9 See Robert D. Hume, "Texts Within Contexts: Notes Toward a Historical Method," ~hilo~)giclll Quart~rly, 71 (1992), 69-100. N~w l iler(lry ~iSl~, 1994, ~5 73-94