Hacking a path through the jungle

Jonathan Bate, the general editor of this series, which replaces the Oxford History of English Literature, announces in a preface how exceptionally difficult it is to write literary history at all in modern times. As the slightly awkward new title of the series suggests, there is all that American, Scots, Welsh and Irish stuff now. They need more than the odd chapter, so away with them. Hundreds of dead women writers are now actually in print who were formerly unheard of. Distinctions between high and low culture have collapsed. Competing theoretical approaches raise terrible anxieties. Evaluation itself is under threat. So the task of writing the history of Eng. Lit., which once involved kicking authors into a neat queue lined up behind Chaucer, dealing firmly with the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease and other old friends, now can’t even be attempted without irony and self-doubt.