Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies

by Ted Underwood

In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete "periods." Since that time, scholars' definitions of literature and their rationales for teaching it have changed radically. But the periodized structure of the curriculum has remained oddly unshaken, as if the exercise of contrasting one literary period with another has an importance that transcends the content of any individual course.

Why Literary Periods Mattered explains how historical contrast became central to literary study, and why it remained institutionally central in spite of critical controversy about literature itself. Organizing literary history around contrast rather than causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of history. But critics' long reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted movements and fateful turns has produced important blind spots in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary study may need digital technology in particular to develop new methods of reasoning about gradual, continuous change.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published July 24, 2013

About the author

Ted Underwood is a professor in the School of Information Sciences and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new opportunities created by large digital libraries. Since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that become visible across long timelines, when we consider hundreds or thousands of books at once. He recently used machine learning, for instance, to trace the consolidation of detective fiction and science fiction as distinct genres, and to describe the shifting assumptions about gender revealed in literary characterization from 1780 to the present.

He has authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005).

Reviews

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting look at how the study of literature engages with history, ranging from a big picture of institutional frameworks (how departments are structured, what kinds of courses are offered) to a more small-scale look at critical terms (context rather than origin, for instance). Certain steps in the argument moved a little bit too quickly for me, and I didn't always agree with the conclusions, but it's a very impressive book, and certainly provides much food for thought.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is intriguing to me as an English professor interested in curricular change. Periodization has been the standard way English departments have designed courses and designated specializations for faculty according to this book since the 1820s when courses in English literature were added to college curricula. The book explorers why this has remained so stable when other disciplines have changed more and used other organizational strategies. Because early nineteenth century novels are outside my area of expertise, I found the first few chapters slow going. I wondered if he was exaggerating the importance of Sir Walter Scott's view of history. The middle section where he explains the development of the English department and the English curriculum, especially the motivation for it was most interesting to me. I had hoped he would propose an alternative structure, but I don't think he did. He talked about digital humanities and more interdisciplinary studies, jut nothing to really replace the period survey course as the model.

[Morgan Kail-Ackerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book was going to be outlining the different literary periods in history. Instead, it was all about history fragmentation and prestige. It was nothing like I was looking for. It was quite boring and talked about the history of King’s College and I guess topics I wasn’t looking for.

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot I admire in Underwood's work, but I found this monograph less helpful than I had hoped.

[Anne Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

A smart, important, yet readable work on the past and future of literary studies. Underwood traces the idea of historical contrast (a kind of awareness of the distinctiveness of different eras) from Romantic-era fictions to nineteenth-century literary survey courses to the "parallel lives" subgenre of 1990s historical fiction (such as A. S. Byatt's Possession). He's done impressive archival research into the history of academic literary studies, using course catalogs and other sources to show that periodization was central to its establishment but that alternatives (such as early twentieth-century comparative and anthropological methods) existed. The concluding chapter looks ahead to ways that digital humanities might reshape literary studies.