Wars, Birds, Cultural Origins, and Oceanic Exchanges

I t has proven hard to insert literature, the post-Renaissance West’s praxis of usually-written figurative thinking, symbolic imagination (which takes other forms and meanings in other times and cultures), or indeed other media of the fictive imagination into their material context and environs. Or it has at least proven hard to do so without interdicting, impeding, or curtailing the close reading of those media, or ruinously reducing contextual abundance to shape it either to wieldy order or to seeming analytical need of the textual, pictural, philosophical, musical, or other medium. Yet not to do so is to fall into mystifications of Kantian autonomy, as if artistic media had their own life outside other human activities; or as if they were a superstructure floating over material actions, however closely affected by, tied to, them; as if they were not as creative of those actions as they are created by them. Not to do so is also to fail to set them in histories beyond their local creation, to fail to know them as essentially in those wider histories, ultimately planetary (not to coin a phrase). This produces, too,a localizing of large culturalmovements. A clear case is the Italo-centric Renaissance, as if it were not