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As even the casual browser of learned journals or half-listener at academic conferences knows, the question of "literary form" and its relationship to "history" is again open for discussion.¹ Some might counter that the discussion had never actually stopped. Yet it seems safe to say that the ready settlements of the past thirty years provided by variously historicist or materialist approaches have ceased to convince.² We have not yet arrived at a working paradigm amenable to transportation across the boundaries of period, medium, and nation that define our critical practices as scholars. But since questions of form travel across these boundaries, cross-field conversation is critical to any broad description of the phenomenon. This collectively authored essay broaches such a conversation. We attempt to represent salient points of discussions undertaken over the course of several years — occasioned by the authors' individual investigations into various fields, inflected by different approaches to textual study — in an effort to identify and define the terms that provide useful common ground in our disparate ventures.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137010490_3

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