It is no secret, I think, that comparative literature never really caught on in England, compared with Europe or the United States. There are imperial reasons, of course, for the spread and popularity of English studies around the world, but this doesn’t explain the immense popularity of English literature programmes in England relative to either modern languages or comparative literature. Nor does it explain the almost sneering attitude in English studies to working in translation or the great reluctance to consider languages beyond English as part of the curriculum. Even postcolonial studies, that great child of the comparative domain, has appeared in England mainly in English. As such, when the phrase ‘comparative literature’ is used in England, it very often refers to a geographical comparison rather than anything else. There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, Comparative Literature in England is seen as somewhat suspect.

One of the greatest milestone moments in the respective histories of English Literature and Comparative Literature has been the birth of criticism: namely writing that puts forward a scientific method (of sorts) for the analysis of literary texts. Inasmuch as we can differentiate the theoretical histories of the two fields without overlap, major differences appear in their critical methods. Nowhere is this more obvious than in their divergent positions on the value of history.

In his book The Nostalgic Imagination, Stefan Collini (Reference Collini2018) examines the key scholars located in or congregating around Cambridge whose work shaped criticism during the 1920s–1950s, such as F.R. Leavis, William Empson and T.S. Eliot, as well as Basil Willey, L.C. Knights and others. It’s a familiar set. Collini argues, rightly, that the formalist, a-historical practice has been blown out of proportion altogether and that ‘even the supposedly “purest” or most formalist versions of literary criticism always, in practice, depended upon and secreted various types of historical understanding’ (Collini Reference Collini2018: 24).

Still, to say that all criticism is somehow historical is like saying that any perspective is somehow political. In either case, as observers, we would have to infer the history, as we would the politics, from the positions of these critics. More importantly, the fact that such critics exist, like any other people, in a place and time, and necessarily engage with these places and times, doesn’t negate that most of them articulated, often vehemently, the desire to do away with history altogether. And to dismiss this dismissal of history is also to gloss over the biggest calling card for 1920s–1950s British close reading. This calling card – where criticism comes knocking only when it knows history is indisposed – has left an inedible and irreversible imprint on literary study. It has also, much less appealingly, been a useful tool for various kinds of anti-political, anti-cultural, anti-historical analysis anti-critique that stands at cross purposes with criticism altogether.

While close reading has changed literary study in almost all languages, the tendency towards this formalist, a-historical, even a-political criticism seems to be singularly strong in English studies. It has not, for example, been a noteworthy part of critical practice in comparative literature. If the most limiting myth of Comparative Literature as a discipline has been its Eurocentrism, the worst myth of English literary criticism has not just been its isolationist monolingualism, but the accompanying persistence of precisely this formalist, eventually self-aggrandizing kind of close reading.

Of course, the two fields have built up over time a mutual suspicion of each other’s critical methods. Even in Collini’s otherwise generous work, the scepticism towards Comparative Literature entrenched in English studies is obvious. As he historicizes the rise of close reading at Cambridge, Collini locates a sliver of time in which there may have been a potential for comparative thought in British critical culture. He is quick to make clear, however, that the British comparative method was specifically a comparison of the social evolution of forms, and not ‘merely’ a ‘comparative literature’, that is, the study of literature in more than one language.

Here, ‘merely’ is the key word. In many ways, Collini’s dismissal of ‘comparative literature’ itself (the scare quotes are his, the question about their necessity, mine) undergirds the attitude I have often met towards Comparative Literature in England, even in relation, for instance, to other Anglophone contexts. After all, if comparative literature is ‘merely’ work that is done in different languages, English literature is ‘merely’ work that is done in one language. It’s hardly a step up.

While this potential for a British evolutionary comparative method passed out of fashion, it took scholars such as René Wellek and others in the United States to push forward once and for all ‘the need to eradicate any lingering theoretical ambitions of this kind’, and, from there, to make ‘comp lit’ (again placed in quotation marks) something more than the study of literature in more than one language (Collini Reference Collini2018: 5). So not only does the ‘mere’ study of literature in other languages appear as an unfathomably low bar to set, but mid-century comparatists represented by the likes of Wellek seem to be eradicators of disciplinary potential altogether. It’s clear the compliments about Comparative Literature aren’t exactly flying in.

It isn’t clear, however, why Wellek’s now classic essay ‘Comparative Literature Today’ is cited in the footnotes. In this essay, Wellek (Reference Wellek1965) reiterates, in case reiteration was ever needed (even Wellek himself sounds surprised that he needs to say it), that Comparative Literature didn’t try to do away with anything. Rather the comparative method was supposed to be more of everything. Wellek argues that contemporary analysis had turned into predictable classification and teleological evolution, or what he describes memorably as an ‘artificial demarcation of subject matter, a mechanistic concept of sources and influences, [motivated] by cultural nationalism’ (Wellek Reference Wellek1965: 326). It was, he felt, better to expand this into a more serious practice of three things simultaneously: history, theory and literature. What Wellek was calling for, in other words, is what most examiners and reviewers mean when they write in shorthand on a given script that the argument ‘needs to be developed’. At its best, the practice of tracing influences and forms had become mechanical and therefore superficial; and at its worst, it projected values of progress on literary and linguistic forms and ultimately fostered cultural jingoism.

Multilingualism – itself a suspicious incomprehensibility to monolingual scholarship – has never been the singular goal of comparative literary study. Rather, language acquisition is a required skill for studying literature in general, and literature itself is assumed to be organically comparative. The assumption of Comparative Literature, then, is that literature in any given language inherently points to another, whether it is a neighbouring one or further afield. The specific task of comparison, in Wellek’s description, is the ability to critique, historicize and read. Linguistic skill was merely (the right way to use the word here) one of the tools necessary to conceive, even at a primary level, of the global reach of the subject. Practising comparative literature, however, required a method, and that method, according to Wellek, was partly historical. As such, a multi-national literary corpus in itself was not a representative microcosm of the field. ‘I have a taught a course on the European novel’, Wellek writes in Comparative Literature Today, ‘yet I never called it comparative’. The goal was not that literatures should be placed alongside each other. Rather, the historical fact of literatures was that they were products of geographical and linguistic interference, and the comparative critical goal was to find a method for how to compare them.

To see the project of comparative literature as ‘merely’ or primarily the study of languages, or to limit comparison to ‘merely’ the evolution of generic forms is an intentional and consistent misrepresentation in monolingual studies about the range of comparative literature criticism. And it reflects, in a point, the consistent chafing between comparative criticism and English criticism around the use of history as a critical method.

Of course, the particular self-consciousness that the mid-century critics had about their historical location undoubtedly helped push forward the agenda to use literary history. If Collini has to do some heavy tooth-pulling to draw out a historical inference from the English critics by insisting (rightly) that all critics stand in some historical position, there is no need to drill down so hard to see how the historical self-consciousness of comparatists such as Wellek, Etiemble or Auerbach drove their critical engagement. For such writers, locating oneself in history was very much part of the critic’s job. Their awareness – however faulty or missing, I am not making a claim here for ineffable comprehensiveness – of their positionality made historiography an inextricable extension of their politics; and such self-consciousness has left its imprint on all subsequent critical practice in comparative literature.

Yet if this self-consciousness about historical location made historiography for these comparatists a political, or even simply an important preoccupation, this sensitivity doesn’t seem to exist in the English critics at all. Even re-gifting historical context to the adamant close readers does not turn their efforts into a conscious politics. Collini is certainly right. The moment for British comparative literature did pass, but not because few in England were interested in social evolution or because some European scholars in the US wanted to prioritize ‘foreign’ language study. It was because few of the British scholars working with criticism at later stages wanted to engage with politics so overtly. When it did appear, political engagement was always pushed slightly away, placed at a slight angle to critical practice under different names, notably that of cultural studies.

The major exemplar here is, of course, Raymond Williams. (Included in Collini’s corpus, Williams appears anomalous among the other critics, not just because he comes from a later point in time.) With Williams – a mastermind at articulating ‘perspective’, including using perspective in literary history – Comparative Literature in English may indeed have been given another potential for life at the hands of later generations, especially those from the British Isles or, more widely, immigrant origins, or Europeans during the heyday of EU–UK research. This did not, however, happen. The popularity of English reigned supreme. English literature remained one thing, comparative literature (often a pseudonym for modern languages) was another; and cultural studies very much a floating subset. Williams’s recognition of his positionality – both his political beliefs and his self-described liminality in the British academic establishment – has kept him an anomaly in British criticism.

Yet, for comparatists, positionality has been consistently important. Edward Said’s (Reference Said1986) essay on Auerbach has been a game changer for Comparative Literature in the way it articulated how exile (in Auerbach’s case, during the Second World War) could be identified as the rationale for critics to take or stake a position, that is, to desire or practise that wonderful phrase ‘secular criticism’. Of course, not all comparative critics in the twentieth century were exiles (nor, certainly, were they necessarily politically opinionated). Yet many were, or saw themselves as being, different. The early European critics in America, for instance, Wellek, Spitzer or Auerbach, never really hid their feelings of difference. Even at the most superficial level, if they weren’t migrants and exiles, they were Europeans who seemed to feel that they were being attacked by those in mainland Europe for now being representative of American supremacy.

For those elsewhere, whether earlier in the century, such as Posnett, or later, such as Etiemble, comparative literature itself was coined as a perspective of difference from mainstream language studies, from national historiography, even from institutionalized pedagogy. The critic practised Comparative Literature from a specific location while looking elsewhere, beyond the ground beneath their feet, and comparative literary criticism often presented the drive to regain some kind of historical loss or some forgotten detail of historical interrelationality. Finding a use and rationale for history itself became a kind of critical practice. For this reason, most major comparatists have produced literary histories; and histories of literature, world histories of literature, histories of world literature and even histories of criticism have been essential components of the library of Comparative Literature. By being a critical method, history allowed comparatists not just to seek the ideals of selection and balance in deciding a corpus, but also to articulate the (personal) perspective required for critical analysis of texts.

As such, it was often on the basis of their lack of coverage and historical attention, rather than a lack of language knowledge, that mid-century comparatists condemned British critical methods. Wellek himself historicized the invention of modern criticism in Cambridge in his grand opus of modern criticism as well as his shorter work on the theory of literature. He could appreciate the Cambridge critics, but he could also critique a critical method devoid of linguistic skill and historical perspective, just as he had criticized the evolutionary, multilingual comparative method of earlier comparatists outside England.

But even the earlier social positivists that Wellek himself found wanting had criticized the British comparative method for its lack of historical aptitude. Comparatists such as Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett and Hugo Meltzl, both proponents of the social-evolutionary method for literature found the English evolutionary comparative method lacking because of its local focus. ‘Local focus’, again, wasn’t problematic directly due to a lack of language knowledge, but because it meant a lack of historical understanding of how literature in any language had evolved in the first place. Posnett’s (Reference Posnett1996 [1886]) manifesto famously critiques Matthew Arnold’s lack of comparative reach:

Posnett’s antidote to the best of what was said and done might too easily be read as a formulaic pitting of England and European. Matching European Renaissance to English Middle Ages is still a familiar chess move used by Anglophiles and Europhiles in English studies today: here’s my Petrarch to your Shakespeare; my Boccaccio to your Chaucer; my Greeks to your Romantics; and so on. Most importantly, however, Posnett’s call to look beyond England’s shores was made on the basis that to be truly historical, a full, proper picture for a pattern of literary evolution had to be compared across geographies and languages.

Posnett was not the only one. Even for the nineteenth-century comparatists, national history seemed an insufficient framework for a comparative method, including for those, such as Hugo Meltzl, who hoped for a universal literary harmony. Meltzl (Reference Meltzl, Damrosch, Melas and Buthelezi2012) clearly called for the ‘reform of literary history’ – one that is ‘possible only through an extensive application of the comparative principle’. His now celebrated preface condemns the shortcomings of the available literary histories – some, he writes furiously, are even based on periods designated by kings. The emphasis is mine, the revulsion his, but the kingly periodization is also familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory course in English lit. Such periodization, according to Meltzl, made literary histories ‘thoroughly unacceptable to the mature taste and […] quite unprofitable for serious literary (not political and philological) purposes’ (Meltzl Reference Meltzl, Damrosch, Melas and Buthelezi2012: 42–43). Reform, he argued, could only happen through extensive work in comparative fields, and especially translation.

From Meltzl and Posnett to Wellek and Etiemble, across different geographical areas: both critical writing and collaborative ventures implied that criticism in comparative literature had to engage with writing literary history. Over and again, when comparative literature appeared, history and criticism became intertwined forces. Because how else can we as comparatists ask one of our most foundational, disciplinary questions: what brings these texts together?

And this endeavour to keep searching for organizing principles for literature remains the obvious difference not just between Comparative Literature criticism and English criticism, but between world histories of literature and English literary histories. For even English literary history has taken a different tradition from histories in other languages by remaining almost viciously monolingual, restrictively geographic and obsessively periodized. Whereas world histories of literature abound and proliferate in other languages, there has not been, according to the editors of the recent Literature: A World History (Damrosch and Lindberg-Wada Reference Damrosch and Lindberg-Wada2022) who seem to be bucking the tide in this respect, any major world history of literature written in English. (Relatedly, the discipline of World History itself, somewhat like Comparative Literature, never became a major force in England despite various active proponents.) The organizing principle in English literary history remains assumed and sometimes even predictable, coming down to some variation of nation, language, period, genre or even thematic. Veering too far off this paradigmatic ground threatens to give rise to a question that, unlike the case in Comparative Literature, is often meant to be sceptical: but what brings these texts together?

So we end up with the irony that in English studies, the most global language of them all, the question ‘what brings these texts together?’ very often sounds dismissive. It may be ironic, but it’s also easy to see why. If the assumptions of language, geography and periodization are so fixed, attempting a historical answer to ‘what brings these texts together?’, not least one that goes against the grain of the primary school history textbook, is doomed to figure like a highly conjectural kind of intellectual history. And we know by now the disciplinary myth of English criticism that history was just not supposed to be criticism.

Still, we also know that disciplinary myths can be exaggerated. It may be traditional now to take for granted the parting of ways between history and criticism. This is in part a legacy of the very specific antagonism expressed towards history by the English critics at the peak of their fame. But this disjuncture has been widely inflated. Antagonism is one thing; the assumption of methodological incompatibility another. At this point in time, the separation of history and criticism seems to imply that a scholar can take one of two roads. The first road, to be avoided at all costs, is the one where the external circumstances of the text count, and this includes the preliminary assumption that any and all texts can be compared. The second road, the road to be taken, is the one where a scholar should hack away at the text in much the same way as a ploughman should hack at asphalt. It is a job that can be done, and where a lot can be unearthed, but one wonders what the larger purpose is and whether the skill of the ploughman might be put to better use.

And when all of this kind of hacking away at a text, and its concurrent dismissal of the exterior of things, is done in the name of prioritizing close reading and practical criticism, of professing criticism and upholding the autonomy of literary texts or the autonomy of scholars, or of maintaining linguistic purity and tradition, this is nothing more than a mask for provincial scholarship, weak pedagogy and poor political affiliation to anything outside of one’s own sliver of society. By separating the roads of history and criticism, we disable historical reading from being political and disable criticism from being critique.

We’re also reading the history of criticism badly. Modern English criticism may have dismissed literary history, but criticism wasn’t supposed to exist, nor did critics propagate that critics themselves should exist, in a void. This is evident in three of the most famous critics in English literature: I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot. The antagonism to history permeates their work. For I.A. Richards, potentially the most radical among them, criticism simply depended on an initial disavowal of the history of the text. After disavowal, criticism was mostly a presentist activity. The point with practical criticism, of course, is that Richards wants to liberate individualist perspective, and time has proved that he has indeed done so to a groundbreaking, sweeping degree (regardless of the seemingly infinite number of chapters with free-floating ‘concepts’ that followed his more thorough tendencies). Reading closely was important because it enables us to appreciate what the text means in itself. Even more importantly, it enables us to appreciate what the text means to us, and, from there, what it, and our work, mean to society. ‘To set up as a critic’, Richards asserts, ‘is to set up as a judge of values’ (Richards Reference Richards2001 [1924]: 54).

What does he mean by value? Despite his obvious talent for a punchline, Richards avoids giving a succinct answer. Value, he explains, is a quality that can be individually assessed to be good for society. He makes it clear that by value, he does not refer to a higher sense of moral codes. The critic wasn’t necessarily a teacher, or a scholar, but someone who wrote on literature and the arts to contribute to larger society: a professional intellectual. The critic, he repeats, is concerned with the health of the mind as much as a doctor is concerned with the health of the body. This insistence on value is important. Without the aim of societal value, Richards’ advocacy for turning one’s personal, even ad hoc value judgements into a profession would have amounted to very little. By engaging with what is valuable in society, by finding and projecting value to society, the critic’s work gains worth.

One wonders, though, why this presentism could not have been historical as well. If all was open to interpretation, couldn’t history be open to interpretation as well? Wasn’t the present connected to history? In a way, Richards’ vision is easy to read as being an engagement without history, which is something of a contradiction in terms. So Richards’ argument ends circuitously. We do need history, it turns out, but one which we can access on our own terms, when we want to. There is certainly a euphoric liberation in this kind of autonomy: one that can be used for society’s benefit, but, conversely, one that can and has been used to uphold complacency.

Compare this with T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the individual talent’, in which he maintains that the work of art is given value by the poet’s use of the ‘historical sense’. The historical sense, famously – the dictum to write with the weight of the whole of literature of Europe on your shoulders while still being conscious of your place in the present – upholds a sense of both the temporal and timeless. What’s confusing about this is that it’s called the historical sense when Eliot seems to be describing feeling contemporary, or even modern. He refers to an awareness of time, but not necessarily an awareness of teleology. Criticism then, for Eliot, even self-criticism, remained primarily an aesthetic act to assess how a certain author compares with predecessors. If Richards offered presentist, social involvement with no history, Eliot seemed to offer a feeling of history with no social involvement at all.

Yet, by insisting too much on the principle of disassociating or depersonalizing the work of art, and ultimately criticism itself, from the author, Eliot’s argument reaches the same circuitous end as Richards. The text is autonomous and lies beyond the author’s jurisdiction. Once it leaves the author’s jurisdiction, it has to go somewhere, though. Rather than call this void history, Eliot calls it tradition. The whole point had been to dismiss history in the first place because it was traditional, but now, ‘tradition’ is conjured up to replace the history we had just discarded. In the same way that social value came to replace historical importance for Richards, tradition replaced historical importance for Eliot. For both, literary history succumbs to the power of the critic and is therefore parsed from distraction.

It takes F.R. Leavis, who was also a disciple of Richards, in much the same way that Cambridge is often a family affair, to take up a concurrent sense of Eliot’s ‘tradition’. For Leavis, too, tradition is different from history because of the critic’s intervention. Where history is descriptive, tradition requires critical intervention in the form of the selection of texts. What Leavis introduces to us here is the potential notion of replacing tradition with canon. At the point he is writing, Leavis doesn’t need to dwell too much on the disdain for literary history, even as it helps that he articulates, much more clearly than his predecessors, the position towards literary history. He begins almost mechanically by dismissing history altogether. Literary history, he explains, muddies our senses with minor writers and forces us to leave our critical faculties at the door. He writes:

It’s that throwaway question – aren’t they all in the literary histories? – that registers the remarkable dismissal of literary history. It is not clear exactly what literary histories Leavis refers to (especially since he describes them as being projected by ‘broadcast’, ostensibly a major ‘public’ site for criticism rather than history). And the idea that there might even be a need for comparative literary history, let alone a comparative method that went beyond personalized aesthetics, does not exist at all.

His defence of what amounts to more or less the right to have a personal opinion on a few novels rather than general value placed on a miscellany of texts is vehement and personal. Marking out a secular ‘Great Tradition’ for literary study was a pointed and personable choice. If the Tradition in Christianity encouraged, ultimately, belief, Leavis’s secular tradition encouraged, ultimately, scepticism. Opining and then defending your opinion of the value of a text is displayed as the measure of a critic’s, or at least this critic’s, individual skill. Belief in the ostensibly higher narrative of history had to be dismissed. Yet what was it worth, in the end, claiming a personal opinion ostensibly devoid of politics?

The first line in The Great Tradition (Leavis Reference Leavis1960 [1948]) remains resounding: ‘The great English novelists are Jane Austen, Henry James, George Eliot and Joseph Conrad.’ Two women, an American and a Pole who had settled in England. What, and I don’t mean this dismissively, brings these texts together? I keep circling back to the question of why this need to expel rather than reform literary history was taken up so singularly in English criticism, especially when the critics were investing so heavily in the social value and professional skill of criticism as practice. In retrospect, this intentional self-distancing from historical circumstance is even mindboggling. F.R. Leavis’s Great Tradition appears at the end of the Second World War. He could have easily taken the comparative route from an English perspective – the Empire is breaking down; the soldiers, if they haven’t returned, are stationed around the world; the country’s infrastructure has been heavily damaged. (Indeed, the difference between Leavis’s 1948 Great Tradition (Leavis Reference Leavis1960 [1948]) and René Wellek’s nearly contemporaneous monumental History of Modern Criticism is astounding. Leavis offers a skeletal corpus and sets out to exclude. The second stretches out to eight volumes with a number of different publishers and apologizes about its lack of coverage.) If there is a point in British history for comparative critical enquiry to take off, this seems to be a good time.

No such thing happens. Instead, we have a re-emphasis on criticism as being different from history and a reclamation of the word ‘tradition’. Leavis’s tradition, written from the perspective of a critic and even academic rather than a poet, assumes a more evidence-based process than Eliot’s by encouraging a method to define a hierarchy of writers. A select few writers embody tradition if they affect generations of later writers. In other words, they move the genre forward. Leavis gives us a lesson in potential social evolution, attempting, in ways that Richards had little use for, to make literary history a matter of critical investigation. But because Leavis is so adamantly against literary history in principle, fighting it as he would imaginary windmills, The Great Tradition stops short (precisely for the same reason that Posnett had criticized Arnold half a century previously) of turning into a comparative-historical method. Rather, it lends itself to becoming a method for canonization based on exclusion, promoted by individual choice and devoid of social engagement – despite the appeal of a fiery tone and reading skill.

It is clear that making criticism an independent practice does not necessitate dismissing history; after all, the independent voice of close reading only becomes effective if it allows us to question our present, our societies, and from there to question the text’s actual relation to, if not intervention in, the literary eco-system. But what is also clear is that the more we artificially separate the practices of history and criticism, the easier we can be, as students or scholars or teachers, apolitical and non-affiliative.

Today, is there such a thing as global historical criticism? Thinking from a global historical perspective means not thinking the weight of Europe on your shoulders, but thinking with the weight of the world. And while all this means articulating tradition (local, regional, global or personal), it also means articulating the critic’s positionality. This is critical practice with a global historical perspective. We might never, as collaborating comparatists and literary scholars, with our anthologies and our world histories, strike the right balance for what Meltzl (Reference Meltzl, Damrosch, Melas and Buthelezi2012) memorably called ‘cosmopolitan humanity’ – but we can, precisely in the balance of the world’s divisions, crises, misrepresentations, keep trying.