The State of the Art on the Art of the State

Abstract

Readers of this journal will recall a forum published in its pages (and the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly) in 2008, in which Eric Slauter, author of one of the three books under review here, described what he called a “trade gap” between historians and literary scholars of the Atlantic world. Slauter’s thesis was that even as literary scholarship has become more historical in its methods and goals, historians seem to have less and less interest in that work: “During the past decade, literary scholars have produced an impressive list of books and articles in the emerging field of Atlantic literary history. Atlantic historians, however, rarely acknowledge this work and have moved away from the issues of identity and expression that made literary scholarship attractive and central to Atlantic historiography ten or twenty years ago” (153). At the end of his essay, Slauter suggests measures that might be taken to lessen the gap. One interesting proposal is that literary scholars should embrace their inner theorists: historians do not come to the work of literary scholars for more history, he suggests, but for alternative perspectives and paradigms about culture, meaning, and language. A second, related suggestion is that the text/context binary be retired: “Today historians may be suspicious of what they perceive as an essentially derivative historicist enterprise in which this or that literary text is unsurprisingly shown to have emerged from an established context already familiar to historians” (173).