The History That Literature Makes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3132441 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Waswo (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 541 |
| Publication date | 1988-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/469088 |
| OpenAlex | W2334060148 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
4 OETRY, wrote W. H. Auden, makes nothing I believe that, in the long term, he was wrong. Poetry, in the large, archaic sense of any fiction, and especially that class of fictions sufficiently reiterated and reread to become legends-the meeting-grounds of history and myth-can make a great deal happen. I shall here propose that the founding legend of Western civilization-the descent from Troy-in its literary retellings from Virgil to the sixteenth century shaped the actual behavior of Europeans and Americans in their subsequent contact with other, newly discovered cultures. By shape, I mean constitute one cause of. I wish to insist that fictional imaginings, themselves a response to past events, can themselves become a cause of future ones. It is customary for canny academics to be more diffident and guarded in assessing the intricate commerce between fiction and fact, to imply some kind of causation without actually asserting it. For example: The relationship between literature and history is clearly an intimate one. Literature is particularly important in spreading ideas and images about things which are unfamiliar to the general reading public, thus helping to shape opinion and through it policy.' Quite another reason for careful circumspection is provided by recent examination of history as a discursive practice, a narrative that forms the objects of its own interpretation.2 We are aware that history, like nature, is not an inert collection of dingen an sich (things in themselves) merely awaiting accurate representation by a transparent language. My argument presumes this awareness of the constitutive power of any discourse, whether called science, myth, fiction, or history. But I am concerned here simply with one of the things that discourse may constitute: history in the obvious, popular sense of what happened. As the languages we speak determine how we know the world, so the stories those languages tell determine how we act in it
Stealing Stonehenge
Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism
Virgilian Models of Colonization in Shakespeare's Tempest
Axis, Bold as Love
From Masquerade to Maskarade
Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing
Genres of Human
Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?
Before Man
Strategic Anti-Essentialism
Yours in the Intellectual Struggle
Still Submerged
Sylvia Wynter
Innovation Through Tradition
Guyana, Cuba, Venezuela and the "Routes" to Cultural Reconciliation between Latin America and the Caribbean
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,52 |
| Citation span | 1997 - 2016 (20) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |