Influence, Autobiography, and Literary History
Rousseau's Confessions and Wordsworth's the Prelude
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16006140 |
|---|---|
| Authors | W J T Mitchell, William J Mitchell (0000-0002-1872-8791, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 643-643 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | ELH (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8304 • E-ISSN: 1080-6547 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2873236 |
| OpenAlex | W2325784584 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Influence, autobiography, literary history: what logic, what practical necessity could bring these terms together in the same text, even the same sentence? At the most general level, one could imagine a kind of literary history constructed out of chains of influences revealed through the autobiographies of writers. Autobiography would have an extended sense in this form of literary history: all literary texts, it would argue, grow out of a struggle to be original, to be self-authoring, to resist influence. We have such a literary history in the work of Harold Bloom.' It is clearly not the only kind of literary history we can or ought to have, nor is it especially fashionable at the present time. We now construct literary histories without authors, and without appeals to causal or genealogical models of influence. Literary autobiography no longer stands outside the literary system as a direct revelation of authorial intention or consciousness; it is simply another genre to be explained within literary history, with no special historical authority. The logics and necessities that bind together influence, autobiography, and literary history seem, in short, to be themselves parts of a literary history that is behind us. If we wanted to give it a name, we might call it literary history, meaning either 1) a specific period in literary history (the Romantic) dominated by autobiographically expressive writing, and by contradictory impulses to recover lost origins or to forget them in the name of selfauthoring originality that is, the impulse to acknowledge or repress influence; 2) a more general form of historicizing built on antithetical narrative patterns: on the one hand, forms of disjunction (epitomized by separated by gaps and crises, and fleshed out by geistliche essences and representative figures); on the other, forms of continuity (epitomized by master-narratives of the overcoming of contradiction, and the uncovering of what Bloom calls the secret paths that bind texts, authors, and periods to one another). This second version of Romantic literary history is a remarkably capacious formation: it is tempting to suggest that it
Art · Art history · Biography · History of literature · Literature · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Canadian Identity and History · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography
| Citations per year | 0.24 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2009 - 2025 (17) |
| Highly cited | No |