guaranteed to produce a literary history that is not a history of literature.
Recent years have seen a modification of the historical approach that aims to redress the imbalance between history and literature by abandoning chronological development to concentrate on the relations between literary and extra-literary events in isolated periods or authorial careers. Earl Miner, for example, has diagnosed the problem of literary history in general as a dependence on narrative,a rhetorical mode of explanation that was discredited by the New Critics and will have to be replaced if literary history is to regain its former authority. but this solution throws out the baby with the bath. While it is true that the New Critics attacked narrative history, they did so because the history in question was unliterary, not because it was narrated. Unless history takes a narrative form, in fact, it can only mean "extra-literary events," the very thing that the formalists sought to exclude from literary studies. As Tzvetan Todorov has argued, when literary history is stripped of its diachronic dimension, it ceases to be a history of literature and becomes simply a misleading name for the sociology or psychology of literature. And, whatever else these disciplines may do for our understanding of literary texts, by fixing literature in the circumstances of its production they tend to ignore the circumstances of reception, that "use" of texts which determines their relative literariness, and thus to reinforce the very distinction between literature and "history" that literary history must find some way to rectify.
The second principal strategy applied to this problem by American literary historians has been to move to the literary side of the intervening gap and, instead of burying literature in its historical ground, deal exclusively with the most critically esteemed texts produced in America, on the assumption that these acknowledged masterpieces are the best source of information about America. Like the historical method, this one is susceptible to varying