On the Historicity of High Culture

Lionel Gossman's Between History and Literature is the work of a wideranging thinker who combines social and ethical concerns with an erudition that compels respect. From his autobiographical introduction we learn that the most enduring intellectual influence on him was George Lukac's sociological approach to literature. His acknowledgment of subsequent masters is long and varied: Sartre, Raymond Williams, the Geneva phenomenologists, the rediscovered Russian formalists, the Frankfurt School, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Rene Girard, Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, and Fransois Lyotard. His field of expertise extends from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century; and he works frequently in a comparative framework, showing a specialist's knowledge of German and English, as well as French, culture and a broad knowledge of other European literatures and their theorists. At Princeton he has collaborated with Carl Schorske and has no doubt benefitted from the ambience of cultural historians like Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Darnton. I do not usually begin a review with a summary of the author's credentials, but in Gossman's case it is worth noting, since the contribution of this valuable work is based on its author's integration and application of his intellectual itinerary. The essays in this collection vary in style from dense to brilliant, but they are always on important questions and are always stimulating. Though familiar with some of the historical material that forms the middle part of the book (on French liberal and romantic historiography in the first half of the nineteenth century), I was impressed by the breadth of Gossman's theoretical grasp and, with a few exceptions, by his erudition. I do have some questions about the specifics of his interpretation of Thierry and Michelet as well as about the conclusions he seems to have come to in the course of two decades of inquiry into the problematic relation of history and literature, but before posing them, a description of this remarkable work is in order

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