as yet unannounced miracle occurs during the production of these new histories of American literature, they will almost certainly elicit the same objections that have greeted every exercise in the genre since Samuel Knapp published his lectures on American literature, with remarks on some passages of American history, a century and a half ago. If the editors pay much attention to writings that reflect "passages of American history," reviewers will complain that the resulting literary history is insufficiently literary. If, on the other hand, the editors decide to deal only with American texts of acknowledged literary merit, then reviewers will call the volumes insufficiently historical. And if, as seems most likely, they try to forestall both of thee reactions by assigning separate chapters to matters of literary and historical import, they may well hear from some reviewer what Rene Wellek said of the LHUS in 1949: that its compilers seemed to have no very clear idea of what either "history" or "literature" means.
To be sure, such problems are not peculiar to histories of American literature. "'History' and 'literature,' " Howard Mumford Jones once observed, "Are terms the meaning of which everybody knows, but the definition of which nobody can give." The inability to define their key terms has sometimes led literary historians into a kind of despair. "The subject of literary history," Wellek complained in 1941, "has been under fire for several decades. . . . Even enthusiasts for the subject do not seem to envisage a future for it." Apparently counting himself among these despondent enthusiasts, Wellek went on to ask "whether it is possible tow rite literary history. . . a history of literature that will be both literary and history," The accumulated evidence did not seem promising: "It must be admitted that most histories of literature are either social histories or histories of thought as mirrored in literature, or a series of impressions and judgements on individual works of art arranged in a more or less chronological