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Historicist criticism makes more sense as an aesthetic stance than as a discipline for producing knowledge. I examine Galen Strawson's essay \"Against Narrativity\" and Ian McEwan's novel Saturday to account for historicism's distinct aesthetic. Strawson distinguishes between Diachronic and Episodic orientations toward time, and both writers work to validate the Episodic perspective against the claim that Diachronicity is psychologically and ethically normative. Because historicist criticism privileges singular epiphanic encounters with the past that would transcend or preclude narrativization, historicists appear as unhappy Diachronics, seeking an Episodic fulfillment that their prior commitment to totalizing narratives of power renders elusive.

In recent years, Christian scholars of literature have become unusually vulnerable, because their historical commitments to the specificity of the human person on the one hand and to the givenness of their situation in the world on the other have brought them into conflict with dominant valorizations of will, desire, and self-fashioning above all—valorizations abetted by what Shoshan Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” In this essay, I reflect on the current situation for Christian scholars, drawing upon recent work by Patrick Deneen for diagnostic purposes and by Christina Bieber Lake for practical advice about what is to be done.

The Limits of Literary Historicism is a collection of essays arguing that historicism, which has come to dominate the professional study of literature in recent decades, has become ossified. By drawing attention to the limits of historicism-its blind spots, overreach, and reluctance to acknowledge its commitments-this provocative new book seeks a clearer understanding of what historicism can and cannot teach us about literary narrative. Editors Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox have gathered contributions from leading scholars that challenge the dominance of contemporary historicism. These pieces critique historicism as it is generally practiced, propose alternative historicist models that transcend mere formula, and suggest alternatives to historicism altogether. The volume begins with the editors' extended introduction, \"The Enigma of Critical Distance; or, Why Historicists Need Convictions,\" and then is divided into three sections: \"The Limits of Historicism,\" \"Engagements with History,\" and \"Alternatives to History.\" Defying convention, The Limits of Literary Historicism shakes up established modes to move beyond the claustrophobic analyses of contemporary historicism and to ask larger questions that envision more fulfilling and more responsible possibilities in the practice of literary scholarship.

This innovative book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. Haddox shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African-Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself lifestyleattractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, Fears and Fascinations contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.Thomas F. Haddox is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has published articles in American Literature, Mosaic, Modern Language Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, and Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

Gayl Jones’s novel has most often been read as testament to the continuity of the traumas of slavery and sexual violence across temporal and spatial boundaries—traumas transmitted and affirmed both through familial descent and through the enduring vitality of the blues aesthetic. This essay argues, however, that what affirms most strongly is not a more accurate (because more traumatic) history but rather what Stephen Best has recently called the desire to make the past present. What Ursa Corregidora struggles to realize in the novel is precisely the pastness of the past, the recognition that the past need not determine the present. Because this realization is thematically bound up with a celebration of nonprocreative sexuality and with an ambivalent critique of futurity, it anticipates a number of contemporary emphases within queer theory.

Haddox examines myth as therapy in Lee Smith's Oral History. He defines myth as a stereotype presumed to carry a transhistorical and even, in some versions, a religious authority, but invoked in the service of therapeutic self-fashioning.

Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone, a parodic revision of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind , has been billed as a work of revisionist history that challenges familiar notions about life on plantations. Yet its use of a fictive source and its therapeutic ethos suggest that it may be more accurately described as an example of what Teresa L. Ebert has called \"ludic\" postmodernism—a mode of thinking whose privileging of difference and performativity offers psychological satisfactions at the expense of a truer and more transformative history.

Despite hading from and frequently setting his fiction on the Eastern Shore of Maryland - a region whose history includes slavery, plantation agriculture, widespread support for the Confederate cause during the Civil War, and de jure racial segregation into the 1960s - John Barth is rarely considered a southern writer.