Literary History and the Concept of Literature

The concept of literature is central to histories of literature, but ‘literature’ is less of a unitary notion than one might think: what is literature according to one established usage may not be literature according to another conventional way of considering the term. It is, in reality, a problem for the writing of literary history with large historical scope that the concept of literature is traditionally used in a much broader fashion about works from – very approximately – before 1800 than about more modern works. I argue that this problem is in fact inescapable – it cannot be overcome without breaking with the genre expectations on a history of literature – but that writers of literary history should at least not hide it but be fully attentive to this state of affairs and adopt an explicit attitude to it.