theoryofliteratu00inwell

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Theory of Literature
intuitively, though provisionally, grasp what is essential to the
genre which is his concern, and then go to the origins of the
genre, to verify or correct his hypothesis. Though the genre will
appear in the history exemplified in the individual works, it will
not be described by all traits of these individual works: we must
conceive of genre as a "regulative" concept, some underlying
pattern, a convention which is real, i.e., effective because it ac-
tually molds the writing of concrete works. The history never
needs to reach a specific aim in the sense that there cannot be
any further continuation or differentiation of a genre, but, in
order to write a proper history, we shall have to keep in mind
some temporal aim or type.
Exactly analogous problems are raised by a history of a period
or movement. The discussion of development must have shown
that we cannot agree with two extreme views: either the meta-
physical view that period is an entity whose nature has to be
intuited, or the extreme nominalistic view that period is a mere
linguistic label for any section of time under consideration for
the purposes of description. Extreme nominalism assumes that
period is an arbitrary superimposition on a material which in
reality is a continuous directionless flux, and thus leaves us with
a chaos of concrete events on the one hand and with purely sub-
jective labels on the other. If we hold this view, then obviously
it does not matter where we put a cross-section through a reality
essentially uniform in its manifold variety. It is then of no importance
what scheme of periods, however arbitrary and me-
chanical, we adopt. We can write literary history by calendar
centuries, by decades, or by years, in an annalistic fashion. We
may even adopt such a criterion as Arthur Symons did in his
book on The Romantic Movement in English Poetry. 28 He dis-
cusses only authors born before 1 800 and of those only such as
died after 1800. Period is then merely a convenient word, a
necessity in the subdivision of a book or the choice of a topic.
This view, though frequently unintended, underlies the practice
of books which devoutly respect the date lines between centuries
or which set to a topic exact limitations of date (e.g., 1700- 1750)
unjustified by any reason save the practical need for some limits.
This respect for calendar dates is legitimate, of course, in purely
bibliographical compilations, where it provides such orientation