History is always in practice a reading of the past. We make a narrative out of the
available ‘documents’, the written texts (and maps and buildings and suits of
armour) we interpret in order to produce a knowledge of a world which is no longer
present. And yet it is always from the present that we produce this knowledge: from
the present in the sense that it is only from what is still extant, still available that
we make it; and from the present in the sense that we make it out of an
understanding formed by the present. We bring what we know now to bear on what
remains from the past to produce an intelligible history.He comments:’ “history” is freely acknowledged to be a kind of story-telling towards the
present, that is, a textual construct at once itself an interpretation and itself open to
interpretation’ (Felperin 1991:89). The idea of a single ‘History’ is rejected in favour of
the postmodern concept (Belsey 1991:27) of ‘histories’, ‘an ongoing series of human
constructions, each representing the past at particular present moments for particular
present purposes’ (Cox and Reynolds 1993:4).
The growth of radical alternative histories, such as women’s history, oral history, and
post-colonial rewriting of Eurocentric and other imperialist viewpoints, together with the
more general blurring of disciplinary boundaries between historiography, sociology,
anthropology and cultural studies, have all cast doubt on the validity, relevance or
accessibility of historical ‘facts’ (Barker et al. 1991:4). Cultural history draws closer to
the concerns of the humanities and anthropology: ‘The deciphering of meaning...is taken
to be the central task of cultural history, just as it was posed by Geertz to be the central
task of cultural anthropology’ (Hunt 1989:12). With the emergence of the postmodern
concept of ‘histories’ several questions have been put on the agenda of theory: for
example, what valid distinctions can be made between the ‘narrative’ of history and the
‘fiction’ of texts? (Montrose (1989:20) called for the recognition of ‘the historicity of texts
and the textuality of history’; see also White (1973).) What are the implications of our
construction of the past from our present situation? What is the relationship between
‘histories’ and power?
The rise of newer forms of literary historicism is connected, in part, with social change
and the effort to recover histories for blacks, women and minority groups within society.
In turn, these social aims are linked with the recuperation of forgotten texts, including
texts that have never been considered worthy of academic study. Such changes have, of
course, benefited the academic study of children’s literature.
The major influence in all this is that of Michel Foucault. As David Perkins puts it,
[Foucault] encouraged his readers to reject the traditional Romantic model of
literary change as continuous development, to resituate literary texts by relating
them to discourses and representations that were not literary, and to explore the
ideological aspects of texts in order to intervene in the social struggles of the present,
and these remain characteristic practices of present-day historical contextualism—
of New Historicism, feminist historiography, and cultural criticism.
Perkins 1991:4THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES 31