#literary critics sometimes forget they are not actually historians and act like the value of literature

[anghraine]

Elizabeth, you inspire me. A while ago, I ranted to you (and asked for your advice) about my wish to major in Literature, if you remember me. I just wanted to tell you that every time I lose my motivation, I come back to your blog and just get inspired to be like you. Btw I'm getting myself prepared by familiarising myself with some of the things that might be challenging in the long run, and I'm finding myself quite frustrated with the History of English Literature. Any advice for that?

Belatedly, thank you very much! That's a lovely thing to say.

With regard to the history of English literature, that's a very broad topic. Maybe it seems more so to me because I've always tended to focus a lot on particular subjects I find compelling, and I pay probably less attention than I should to the areas that I don't specifically study or want to study—nearly all my undergrad and master's literature courses were in early modern, eighteenth-century, or nineteenth-century British literature, because I had a lot of freedom of choice and those were what I was interested in (I managed to arrange things so that I took eighteenth-century literature five times, for instance).

Apart from Tolkien classes, I think I've taken maybe three twentieth- or twenty-first century literature classes ever (the only one I much cared for was a bell hooks seminar). So I often don't weigh in on discourse around most twentieth-century literary controversies because I genuinely don't know much about them. On the other end, I've taken late medieval English lit classes but I don't know much (or care much) about early medieval literature. I've taken enough survey courses to have a general sense of most periods, but that's about it if they don't fall within my range of interests.

So I'm probably not the best person to give advice on studying English literature broadly because I did my best to specialize as often as possible, as early as possible. The only advice I can really give about English literature as a whole is to try and take it piecemeal.

This doesn't have to be breaking it down into the traditional periods of things like medieval literature, early modern literature, etc, but I would be wary of sweeping generalizations about trends or about what English literature is or what its history looks like unless the evidence is incredibly strong and you're familiar enough to evaluate it.

The attempts to create large-scale narratives often leave out the specific details that make literature interesting, and also often leave out details that are inconvenient for those narratives, the voices of marginalized people, genres the generalizer doesn't personally prioritize as much, etc. A lot of accounts of the history of the English novel do all these, for instance.

When you're looking at literature, IMO the most important thing is to look at the specific details of the particular work you're reading, before you try and fit it into any of these grander narratives or even engage closely with those narratives. Afterwards, you can dig around for context, you can learn things about the era or the literary moment that clarify things in the text, you can look at others' interpretations and learn from them, but I think it's generally better to experience your own unforced reactions to texts as much as you can before you start looking at surrounding material.