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The
Nostalgic Imagination History in English Criticism The Ford Lectures 2017
Stefan
Collini
Oxford: University Press, 2019 Hardcover. x+246 p. ISBN 978-0198800170. £25
Reviewed by Guy Ortolano New York University
One indication
of the close relationship between historical and literary studies is the
predilection of practitioners of both for writing histories of literary
studies. This tradition includes valuable contributions from, among others, Chris
Baldick, Terry Eagleton, John Guillory, and Chris Hilliard. A particularly
distinguished instalment remains Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature : An Institutional History (1987). Graff’s
account of literary studies in the United States rejects the Whiggish scheme in
which long-dead, half-read forebears are steadily displaced by increasingly
familiar approaches and priorities. Graff’s anti-Whiggish approach replaces that
sequential narrative with a series of oppositions: classicists versus moderns,
researchers versus generalists, academics versus journalists. A central dynamic,
running through several of these oppositions, pits ‘scholars’ (who, broadly
speaking, tend to approach literature through the world of which it was a part)
against ‘critics’ (who, broadly speaking, tend to isolate literature from the
world of which it was a part). The key moment in the long history of this
tension – the moment when it did not simply inform the argument, but when it was
the argument – fell between 1915 and 1965. Graff is too fine a scholar to depict
this age as having set criticism ‘against’ history, but he does show how
educational theorists and literary critics found agreement that ‘great literary
works are independent of history’, and therefore that literary criticism should
strive to ‘rescue tradition from the jaws of history’ [Graff : 177, 171]. Stefan Collini’s
newest book, The Nostalgic Imagination,
interrogates this purported opposition between history and literary criticism. His
focus is not the ‘New Criticism’ of Graff’s U.S. academy, but rather its English
relation in what is often referred to as ‘Practical Criticism’. Both movements took
as their point of departure what Frank Lentricchia called the New Criticism’s
‘denial of history’, echoing the provocation of Practical Criticism’s founder,
I.A. Richards, that he ‘didn’t think History ought to have happened’ [12]. For
a scholar of Collini’s temperament, such forthright proclamations offer a
target-rich environment. The Nostalgic
Imagination reveals the surprising ways that even the most seemingly ahistorical
works from this age of criticism not only depended upon conceptions of history,
but also influentially conveyed those conceptions to a wider public. The intellectual
space for this unlikely happening was created by a pair of developments that Collini
maps at the outset. First, academic historians more or less abandoned the field
of popular exposition, as researchers beholden to Rankean virtues prioritised
the production of specialized political and diplomatic histories instead. Second,
appreciative literary histories suffered a sudden fall from grace, as the
continuities they celebrated with Romantic and Victorian forebears became
replaced by a sense of radical estrangement from England’s recent past. Roughly
between T.S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (1920)
and Raymond Williams’s The Long
Revolution (1961), Collini argues, literary criticism came to shape
historical understanding by advancing particular – and particularly influential
– conceptions of English history. This opening
launches the exquisite series of critical-historical studies that comprise this
tour de force. Born of Collini’s Ford
Lectures at Oxford in 2017, most chapters focus on the giants from the heyday
of English criticism. There are sustained studies of T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis,
William Empson, and Raymond Williams, alongside considerations of Basil Willey,
L.C. Knights, Q.D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart. It is easy to imagine each performance
as a masterpiece of the genre, wry and witty even when most serious. But the prospective
reader should know that the resulting book features the Collini less of English Pasts (1999) than Absent Minds (2006) – less ‘With Friends
Like These’ or ‘Against Prodspeak’, more ‘Chapter 2: A Matter of Definition’. In
other words, these closely argued chapters are often heavy going. For
specialists, though, each chapter repays the concentration it demands,
beginning with the foundational consideration of Eliot. Collini begins
by considering the origins and fortunes of Eliot’s famous phrase, the ‘dissociation
of sensibility’. During the seventeenth century, Eliot wrote in 1921, something
‘happened to the mind of England’ [38]. ‘[T]he structure of Eliot’s claim
evidently involves movement from a kind of wholeness to a kind of
fragmentation’, Collini writes. ‘[W]hat had been fused in a unity was
thereafter sundered into separate parts and not only in poetry’ [39]. But as Collini
stresses, Eliot’s statement stubbornly resists such tidy explication: it was
less an analysis than a gesture, though – and herein lies the puzzle – a sensationally
impactful one. By 1925, just a year after its reprinting in Homage to John Dryden, Edwin Muir could
remark: ‘That this analysis is accepted as a truism by intelligent people today
is due chiefly to Mr Eliot’ [39]. Eliot’s influence was indeed extraordinary. ‘[T]hose
styles of literary criticism that claimed to take their inspiration from
Eliot’, Collini notes, ‘became the dominant fashions in the study of literature
in British and American universities between the 1930s and 1960s’ [27]. That those
‘fashions’ were purportedly ahistorical is perplexing, not least in light of
their founding debts to Eliot’s reading of England’s seventeenth century. Yet the subsequent
chapters do more than trace Eliot’s ‘influence’ upon later criticism. Take the case
of Leavis. Eliot, to be sure, mattered to Leavis. Not only his poetry, which
Leavis championed in New Bearings in
English Poetry (1932), but also his sense of history. For Leavis, as for
Eliot, the seventeenth century had been decisive. Leavis cited the
‘dissociation of sensibility’ in Scrutiny
in 1935, in an essay reprinted the following year in Revaluation. But it is precisely because of these well-known debts to Eliot, including
to his ideas about history, that Collini’s readings here are so striking. When
he unearths the sources that informed Leavis’s Ph.D. thesis of 1924, Collini
turns up the likes not of Eliot – whose ‘dissociation of sensibility’, the next
year, Muir could already proclaim a truism – but rather William John Courthope,
Alexandre Beljame, Leslie Stephen, and G.M. Trevelyan. What follows is a dazzling
analysis of Leavis’s engagement with (or, at least, citation of) historiography
over time, alert to the precise moments when the seventeenth century, the
Industrial Revolution, or the Victorians began to figure in Leavis’s thought. These
readings show that purported entity, ‘Leavis’s thought’, to have been
historical in another sense: developing over time, in response to particular
arguments and developments, rather than existing as a static ‘thing’ for the
historian to invoke. A later chapter displays similar nuance in revisiting Hoggart’s
The Uses of Literacy: a 1957
publication, which achieved iconic standing during the 1960s, but which, Collini
shows, is best understood as a product of the ten years after 1945. So while this
is a study of, as the subtitle puts it, ‘History in English Criticism’, it is
more precisely about the various ways that ideas about history, sometimes
explicitly but often implicitly, informed, structured, and emanated from English
literary criticism between roughly 1920 and 1960 (an admittedly less efficient
formulation). To this end, given its sheer degree of difficulty, the chapter on
Empson stands out. Consider the task confronting the reader of The Structure of Complex Words (1951). ‘One
way to describe its structure’, Collini writes, ‘would be to say that an outer
ring of barbed wire surrounds an inner ring of ditches and ha-has, at the heart
of which there is a labyrinth’ [116]. Yet our author emerges triumphant, having
revealed the historical assumptions that structured even this most unhistorical
of arguments. After a chapter on Hoggart, Q.D. Leavis, and the notion of the
‘reading public’, readers next encounter a bracing dismantling of Williams’s Culture and Society (1958). If Empson
refrained from invoking history, requiring Collini to excavate its work,
Williams produced an influential history, requiring Collini to put it in its
place. I confess to finding satisfaction in the critique, though an unnerving
question lingers: could anyone withstand
such scrutiny? Surely not the ‘figures of the second rank’, as Collini calls
them, who populate Chapter 3 [77]. Here, the works of Basil Willey and L.C.
Knights attest to the ways that Eliot’s ‘throwaway remarks’ on seventeenth-century
poetry improbably became ‘transmuted into something altogether more
conventional, but perhaps also more usable’ [125, 87-8]. Eliot’s initially
revisionist literary history had, by the 1930s, come to function along the
lines of a Kuhnian paradigm: that is, as the interpretive framework that, often
unreflectively (but thus all the more pervasively), served to organize a
generation of scholarship and teaching. As was true in
Kuhn’s account, Collini’s explanations hew closely to his subjects’ work. The
book opens with an intriguing epigraph: ‘The historian of literature’, Eliot wrote
in 1919, ‘must count with as shifting and as massive forces as the historian of
politics’. Collini likes the line, returning to it several times, but it must
be said that, for the most part, those ‘massive forces’ remain obscure here. Chapter
7 makes a brave stab at identifying ‘general or structural rather than merely
individual explanations’ for the diffusion of this more-than-literary history,
considering its dissemination through such vectors as adult education and the Pelican Guide to English Literature [185].
But by 1963, Collini remarks, we enter ‘a changed world beyond my chosen
period’, which invites the question of what had changed and why [201]. From roughly
1920 to 1960, this book shows, a broadly declinist view of history structured English
criticism. This ‘nostalgic’ imagination was never universal (see, for instance,
Empson), but it did inform the work of, among others, Eliot, Hoggart, Williams,
and the Leavises. As historians withdrew from public roles, this paradigm extended
beyond literary studies, informing historical schemes and sensibilities in the
public culture generally. What ‘massive forces’ abetted this convergence
between criticism and declinism, and then drove its shifting fortunes? Or, to
put the question more leadingly: Why did a declinist history emerge after the
Great War, retain its purchase through the slump and total war, only to at last
recede in the early 1960s? By gesturing towards social and political contexts,
I am not denying that ideas warrant study in their own right, or suggesting
that intellectual developments are not at times precisely that. But the
intellectual historian, like all historians, is constantly in search of the contexts
that best explain the development at hand. That search might lead others to places
where Collini, through a combination of temperament and conviction, does not go:
outward from these critics and their texts, and into the society and culture into
which they somehow fit. Appropriately for
a volume bookended by references to Leslie Stephen’s Ford Lectures, Collini devotes
part of his conclusion to addressing readers yet unborn. Mindful of likely
criticisms, about his subjects, sympathies, and scope, Collini offers a defence
of his signature critical-historical mode. ‘Making sense of our history,
personal or collective, is’, he writes in the closing paragraph, ‘a constant
struggle to find a way to master multifariousness without denying or violating
it’ [210]. A fitting characterization, and not only of these lectures. For more
than four decades, no historian has more powerfully – or more winningly – waged
that struggle. In That Noble Science of
Politics (1983), Donald Winch and John Burrow saluted their co-author as
‘the team’s captain and its leading scorer’ [ix]. To adjust the national idiom
slightly: a half-century from now, as derisive boos rain down upon what will no
doubt appear our benighted age of intellectual history, is there any question
whom we, desperate for a win, would want to take the mound?
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