Underwood 2013

Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization

literary historians took up Foucault because he was saying what the discipline already did -- "Foucauldian 'genealogy' may have been controversial in history departments, but in literary study it offered an eloquent, philosophical rationale for an approach to history that was already dominant." (134)

blind spot in the discipline -- "widespread amnesia about the whole history of the discipline before New Criticism" (134)

"Until Gerald Graff wrote Professing Literature, many late-20th-century histories of literary study were actually histories 'of literary criticism,' constructing an imaginary genealogy of the discipline that ran from Matthew Arnold thorugh the likes of T. S. Eliot, and largely ignoring the institutional history of the university curriculum. It's especially worth addressing this oversight now, because there are growing signs that literary study may be about to rehearse early-20th-century debates bout the threat of 'scientism' and 'factualism' in our discipline." (135)