Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In developing a characterization of Victorian poetics, it is important to recognize that literary periods are historical hypotheses that depend not only upon assumptions about historical change but also upon historical accident. The organization of literary history into historical periods is a fairly recent phenomenon. It develops from the historicism that dominated nineteenth-century thought, a historicism that was motivated by a distinct sense of modernity. John Stuart Mill begins his essay ‘The Spirit of the Age’ by observing the relationship between modernity and historicism:The ‘spirit of the age’ is in some measure a novel expression. I do not believe that it is to be met with in any work exceeding fifty years in antiquity. The idea of comparing one's own age with former ages, or with our notion of those which are yet to come, had occurred to philosophers; but never before was itself the dominant idea of any age.It is an idea essentially belonging to an age of change. Before men begin to think much and long on the peculiarities of their own times, they must have begun to think that those times are, or are destined to be, distinguished in a very remarkable manner from the times which preceded them.(1963–90: XXII, 228)We have come to rely so heavily on the interpretative categories of Romantic, Victorian and Modern that we forget that these categories were constructed as a way ... log in or subscribe to read full text