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DO MY EYES DECEIVE ME?

Gothic Fiction, Medieval Reality and Whig Interpretation.

Recent articles have justifiably criticised the current fashion for micro-history -studies in great depth of microscopically small historical phenomena. Such work, it is suggested, can be useful only in so far as it produces the building blocks for more general analyses; as an end in itself, it is sterile and renders the study of history fragmented and impenetrable for the layman and the student. Another trend in an academic field is the desire of those who analyse works of literature to consider them as if they had been created in a vacuum or perhaps in a framework of pure art, their authors having been supposedly immune from every influence of the society in which they lived and from every wish to convey any opinion to that society. Finally another current fashion desires to demonstrate that the study of history is an entirely academic activity which has not or, at any rate, should not have the least bearing on political decisions taken concerning the future of nations, themselves an outdated notion. All these contemporary trends correspond both to a compartmentalisation of learning and the notion that the very acquisition of knowledge might usefully be replaced by problem solving skills, more rapidly acquired and immediately applicable. This third trend is the natural consequence of the first two. If academic studies become impenetrable, it is hardly surprising that they lose the influence which they should have on contemporay thinking. It is no use lamenting the superficiality of the modern world if traditional culture chooses to make itself increasingly inaccessible.

Quite apart from any other objective, by its construction and its aims as well as by its content, this article will seek to demonstrate the vacuous nature of these fashionable thoughts by employing both literature

BAM (Bulletin des Anglicistes Médiévistes) 59 (Eté 2001)