Phrases from R. G. Collingwood’s classic essay “The Historical Imagination,” written in 1935 and included in The Idea of History (1946), recurred to me while reading Stefan Collini’s new book, The Nostalgic Imagination.1 Since we cannot experience the past perceptually, Collingwood observes, we can only imagine it as “an object of our thought,” so that “all history is the history of thought.” The historian is part detective, making deductions from clues, and part novelist, constructing a credible, coherent narrative. The present is “the evidence for its own past,” and the historian aims at “reconstructing the past of this present, the present in which the act of imagination is going on, as here and now perceived.”

If this is true of history in general, how far is it true of literary history in particular? The literary historian has the advantage that the raw materials—the texts—remain accessible, but they must still be reconstructed as part of a narrative which was unavailable to their writers. In another classic formulation—T. S. Eliot’s this time—“what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it,” so it follows that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” Collini’s book investigates the efforts of some major literary critics to imagine the past which led to the literature of their own time. He asks such questions as: What makes