History, Literature, and the Atlantic World

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. This phenomenon is a local manifestation of a wider problem affecting the market for literary scholarship in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns within history and the resurgence of historicism within literary studies; call it a “correction” of sorts. While literary studies once served as a major exporter of ideas and methods to the human sciences, especially history, literary scholars now import more from historians than they export to them. To put the point in figurative terms that do not disguise the economic stakes involved, a trade deficit now exists on the side of literary studies. Even as literary scholarship has become markedly more “historical,” it has apparently become less marketable to historians. This essay charts the changing status of literature in recent historiography by focusing on historians as much as on literary scholars. It is designed to be descriptive and prescriptive, to diagnose what I see as a Reviews of Books