1) Literary history deals with creative works as expressions of their time period, language, and culture, rather than just as a mechanical progression. 2) Literary historians collect and interpret creative works, placing them in their historical context while evaluating their merits, taking on roles of historians, linguists, and critics. 3) Literary history has complex problems due to subjective interpretations of collected data on creative works and their relationship to human experiences and changing cultures over time.

1. Dr.B.Kanagalakshmi,
Assistant Professor of English,
V.V.Vanniaperumal College for Women,
Virudhunagar.

2.  History is not a mere mechanical passage of time
which never repeats but recreates itself
 Literary historians - George Sampson, George
Saintsbury and Compton-Rickett- have followed
century-wise division of the different phases of
literature
 Modern scholars like Robert E.Spiller have treated
literary history ahistorically and they look upon it as a
result of the creative expression in a specific language
which incidentally belongs to a people, a period of
time and a place.

3.  They do not treat it as a critical activity despite that the
scholars in literary history evaluate the merit and
demerits of literary works in the historical context.
 They combine in themselves the role of historical
historians, linguistics, textual critics and literary critics
and assume the unbiased and unprejudiced
responsibility of placing the literary work and events
in the cyclic order of time.

4.  The literary historians do not have set theories
 It is replete with problems particularly in regard to the
use of many literary terms, some of them borrowed
and some others original to literary history.
 The complex problematic factors of literary history are
due to the nature of the materials which the literary
historians collect and record and also due to their
subjective responsibility of interpreting the collected
data.

5.  As already mentioned, history is not a mere record of
facts but of human experience concerned with facts.
 It is not what it was but what happened and the
historians who normally do not succeed in exercising
complete objectivity in their interpretations are bound
to commit some subjectivity which is inevitable.

6.  It is enough for the students of Comparative Literature
to be aware of those problematic factors and a clear
statement of the problems would serve their purpose
because in literary history problems can only be
meaningfully described but not defined.
 Therefore, we need not aim at definitions of those
ambiguous literary terms; but their reasonable
descriptions would suffice.

7.  Such historical factors are important in two ways; they
deal with literary experience and they are written in
the idiom of literature.
 They are primarily concerned with two types of
sources called primary events of writing the works of
art and secondary events of revision and presentation
of the same.
 The stupendous responsibility of the literary historian
is to collect all literary works and assemble them
within the limits of their historical enquiry.

8.  This certainly is a trying task as works and their times
of creation are not easily separable.
 Creation - presentation – reception is an
interconnected trio-phenomenon which abides by
inexplicable creative order of evolution and not an
order of mechanical routine and historical
successions.

9.  Traditionally there have been several ways of tackling the
challenging fields of literary history.
 The earliest of them is to discover the works of art and
relate them with their time sequence and it presupposes a
mechanical order of repetition of static events.
 The history of English Literature written by Prof.George
Saintsbury can be cited as a good example of literary
history.

10.  The next way is to relate the literary works of art in their
preceding circumstances of the past and their likely
prospective circumstances to follow.
 Yet another way is to describe the works of literary history
with their historical sources and the experience of the
artists and the culture to which they belong.
 The books of literary history written by Compton-Rickett
and George Saintsbury can be taken as examples of such
literary histories.

11.  The last way which is of recent origin is to relate
historical works as the result of moving force of time.
This defies the historical, mechanical order of
succession but which becomes a creative motion
which is nothing but a cyclic order of live evolution.
The example of this kind of literary history is The Cycle
of American Literature, by Robert Spiller.

12.  The large bulk of historical materials dealing with literary
history may be said to owe their existence to the world of raw
ideas.
 The works of art are derived from the complex of original ideas
characterising people, time and place of their origin. They are
dominant in political and religious moods of human life around
the world. These ideas decide the literary history and they
emerge in the form, for example, of Catholicism, Communism
and Rationalism etc., and contribute to the making of the
materials of literary history such as Christian literature,
Communist literature and Rationlist literature etc.

13.  Whatever may be the name and the habitation, any
and every form of literature deals with the lives of the
people which are rooted in different cultures,
ultimately.
 The word ‘Culture’ is a flexible word to describe the
institutions, habits and norms, values of peoples’ lives
in a given time and place and they are given artistic
expression through creative works of writers.

14.  The literary historians collect information which determines the
relationships among the works of art, the writers and their cultures.
 Sometimes literary historians have to play the role of economic, social
and cultural historians as well.
 For example, a close-knit population like that of the eighteenth century
coffee-house London would cultivate the periodical essay and
epistolary( letters) fiction. Whereas the rural and scattered population
of the early American West would specialise in short stories and short
lyrical poems. The life of farm and forest would produce poetry of
nature with its simple and unsophisticated quality.

15.  The long winter evenings by the log-fire would certainly create
the romances and stories of the distant past and the fashionable
urban cultures of today would lead one to complex symbolism of
the modern verse and fiction with their bent towards
psychological and subconscious explorations.
 Closely associated with culture are political and social
institutions and systematic organisations of group behaviours
and community life, the church and temples with their
ceremonies and rituals, missions and mutts, military
establishments, schools and colleges, universities and research
bodies, …

16.  For instance, Emerson’s Essays cannot but be related
to the rise of the unitarian church in New England;
Swift’s satires cannot be understood without a study of
the political issues of England.
 Therefore, the literary historian is inevitably drawn
into the particular institutions as well as their
accompanying political and religious issues

17.  Yet another source of literary work of art is that of myth and tradition
and the accompanying body of beliefs. Myth and traditions are related
to the world of imagination and not so much to knowledge and
information and they are suggested by symbols and images. For
example, the Hellenic, Herbraic and Nordic systems of belief have their
own histories of values.
 James Frazer’s The Golden Bough has inspired T.S.Eliot to write his
poem The Waste Land , which is a study of the degenerating civilisation
of the modern society.
 Biography provides ample scope for literary history for which Samuel
Johnson’s The Lives can be cited as an example.

18.  With advances in the field of modern science and technology,
the biographical sources have become complicated and the
literary historian has to depend upon literary critics for data for
his historical treatment.
 Literary history deals with events and not with the mere record
of facts and the historical process moves in a cycle of birth,
growth and decline which Robert Spiller calls the moving cycle
of historicism and it goes through a series of periods, movements
and has its form and language conducive to its interpretation.

19.  It consists of two methods, namely, historical research
and historical criticism. The literary historian does not
have to combine the two in him. The historical
researcher has to collect and confirm the historical
findings and the historical critic has to organise and
interpret the data provided. In such interpretations,
the historian is likely is likely to be subjective, in which
subjectivity is inevitable since total objectivity is
impossible.