The Second World War and Second-Wave Historical Criticism: A Selection of Rosemond Tuve's Chapel Talks (1944–1956)

Abstract:Rosemond Tuve's (1903–1964) Chapel Talks, delivered to an audience of students at Connecticut College for Women between 1944 and 1956, provide insight into the larger motivation behind mid-century historical criticism emerging from the Second World War. These talks, a selection of which is introduced and transcribed here, show the link between Tuve's literary thinking and her moral commitments while she was articulating her widely influential arguments about typological criticism and historical criticism more generally. The introduction to her Chapel Talks traces the context of historicism in the turbulence of the war, as in the connection between her groundbreaking analysis of typology in George Herbert's "The Sacrifice" and her experience with Jewish refugees at Black Mountain College. Further, it shows the connection between her critical response to American habits that emerged after victory in the war and questions of medieval and Renaissance periodization posed by Ernst Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. The introduction argues that Tuve's historical criticism is the second wave to Edwin Greenlaw's first wave, articulated in the wake of the First World War, and is linked to emerging European democratic movements supported by the war-time "Anglo-Saxon," or Anglo-American, alliance, in which the United States would play the leading role in politics and literary criticism.