History, Literature, and the Atlantic World

The Spiritual Authority of Literature in a Secular Age

“…The situation recalls Eric Slauter's 2008 essay on the ''disciplinary trade gap'' between history and literature in the study of early America. 2 Slauter explains that whereas twenty or thirty years ago, non-literary fields, above all history, looked to literary studies as a ''major exporter of ideas and methods,'' literary scholars now import more scholarship from history than they export, resulting in a significant citational imbalance and the persistent sense that one discipline is talking and another is listening. 3 The discrepancy, he notes, gives rise to the chronic resentment of something like an unrequited admiration.…”

“…For historians, Slauter remarks, ''contexts are always larger, never smaller'': the panorama of history matters more than the miniature of a single text. 11 Yet those who live with literature know that a text can be more important, more suggestive of human possibilities, simply larger, than our narratives about its historical context.…”