Primary Sources ...

This one's more for my own reference than anything else. New book out in New Zealand, which takes a historical view of a number of obscure (even for New Zealand) Kiwi authors. As the reviewer puts it:

Aesthetic evaluations and obsessive fussing over rankings within the literary canon have given way to a readiness to accept literature as a branch of social history, furnishing documents that can be examined as evidence of bygone attitudes.

For the new sociologically minded approach, the writing analysed does not need to be brilliant. Indeed, brilliance rather gets in the way. The more commonplace - and thus representative - the attitudes expressed the better ...

But still we have the oddity of a work of literary criticism that tackles literature hardly anyone, apart from Stafford and Williams, has read.

I've mostly been focusing on how history informs fiction. But the relationship is a two-way street.