The Extra 617
That the final product must satisfy all of the editors and the publisher. At the same time, every effort is being made to grant each contributor his or her own individual method and convictions, and it is our expectation that there will be considerable diversity of approach. A dull uniformity is certainly not the goal of this history but neither is a pluralistic babble.
There are elements of the book that will guide the reader through the forest of approaches. Each historical period will have at least one introductory essay that will synthesize certain elements of the literature and contexts of each period. The general introduction will highlight some of the recurrent images, ideas, and issues that may serve not as threads or main currents running through the history or as roots from which texts spring, but as receptions in the structures, languages, and themes of the literature that seem today to us to have symbolic cultural meaning. It is my hope that the readers who moves consecutively through the work, or one who reads selectively, would have an experience similar to that which Lawrence Stone describes as the effect of Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity- a pointillist accumulation of various types of information and interpretations from which a larger picture begins to emerge.
But there is no question that the composition of a literary history today involves a fundamental tension. On the one hand, there is the attempt to unify, to provide coherence, organization, and continuity. These are all convergent elements, so that one force of the history is- to use Bahktin’s useful terms- centripetal. On the other hand, there are divergent or centrifugal impulses pulling away from the center toward plurality of method and diversity of authors and texts, toward a greater understanding of the power of imagination of each author studied and the desire to expand the canon and connect various texts to different types of contexts. This dialogic opposition will be represented in the structure of the sections and the work as a whole.
For example, the effort toward a diverse and multi-layered approach is evident in the design of the very opening section.
Ibid., p. 17.
M. M. Bahktin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 271-72.