HISTORICAL METHODS AND LITERARY STUDIES

 The relationship between historical and literary studies can be a vexed and difficult one. At the heart of this difficulty lies the possible conflict between historical methods of analysis and the formal or stylistic analysis of texts deemed ‘literary’. Here the conflict consists of how the historical contextualization of a literary text, from the moment of its origins to the history of its transmission and reception, might be inimical to the nature of a literary text as an aesthetic artifact. Historical method might reduce the complexities of literary texts by treating them as documents which are transparent to the historical, social and economic circumstances in which they are produced and received, rather than grappling with their stylistic and formal complexities as verbal artifacts. In this context, historical method and critical analysis appear to work with two opposing ideas of the text, the first operating with the notion of a document as reflecting its historical and social contexts of origin and transmission, and the other working with the notion of a literary work as an autonomous verbal object, a self-referential entity which generates its own techniques of analysis and criticism, and which therefore cannot be reduced to the original context in which it was produced .This model of the text assumes that the meanings of literary texts are always in some way trans-historical.