Literature and History

iterature, though unarguably a part of history, is always renegotiating its relationships with the past and the present, and in that process raising powerful questions about the nature of memory and experience, and the nature of writing itself. The English department remains committed to the study of speech, performance, and writing in English, in all the forms these take across time and space. This broad engagement has led, however, to a cluster of distinctive concerns centered on the intersections that define Literature and History. These concerns include the study of how forms of imaginative writing evolve through history; how imaginative writing reflects and helps to shape larger changes in thought, religion, politics, science, economics; how literature shapes our narratives about the past, as heroic, transgressive, sacred and profane. Work in this field probes the shifting definition of what literature is and does, especially as this is defined by the creation of specific canons and traditions of literature, by the establishment of aesthetic categories, and by broad changes in the nature of our reading practices. Literature and History examines the ways in which writing and other kinds of language performance articulate what we call a culture (in all its diverse aspects, from subculture to nation to global community). Far from dissolving literature into other areas of study (history, anthropology, sociology), it seeks to make sense of how literature comes into being, of how it engages with broader currents of debate within various cultural registers, and of how, through all these interactions, it sustains for itself a distinctive value and function.

The rubric Literature and History reflects the continuing interests and current work of many of the faculty and graduate students within the Department (please refer to individual faculty and graduate student pages for further particulars). It points to such undertakings as the study of the capacity of individual texts and authors to “transcend” history or to resist it overtly; the history of literary forms and styles (lyric, epic, romance, novel, short story); the history of specific traditions (theatrical, narrative, performative; science fiction, narrative poetry, outlaw texts); the history of readers and the process of reading and interpretation (allegory, orality and literacy, the impact of the visual); the history that marks out specific communities of readers (gender, high and low culture, ethnic and racial identities); and the historical circumstances and legacies of literary texts.

Distinctive resources that support work in Literature and History include the University's association with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C., where graduate students regularly participate in seminars; access to the special archives of the George Eastman House and the International Museum of Photography and the collections of Strong Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, Rare Books and Special Collections in Rush Rhees Library; on-going projects such as the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, the Chaucer Bibliographies, and the Camelot Project (and their long history of national grant support); the Robin Hood Project; international conferences such as Reconceiving Chaucer, The Cultural Transformations of Robin Hood, and Camelot 2000; the unparalleled collections for medieval literary and cultural study at the Rossell Hope Robbins Library; the annual Helen Ann Robbins Lecture, and the Robbins Pre-Doctoral Fellowship; the Cornell-Rochester graduate symposium in medieval studies; the Cluster on Pre-Modern Studies; the several medieval publication series associated with Boydell & Brewer (UR Press); and links with faculty and initiatives in other departments and programs (History, Film Studies, Art and Art History, Modern Languages and Cultures, Visual and Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, Eastman School of Music Humanities, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies, and the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies). Advanced students are eligible for dissertation research fellowships offered through Rush Rhees Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.