In recent years, we have seen a range of calls for the revitalization of literary and cultural studies through transformation of our theoretical and methodological paradigms. One of the most recent is the “V21 Manifesto” of 2015 assembled by a Victorianist collective of scholars who work primarily in British studies. This document argues that Victorian literary and cultural studies is mired in “positivist historicism” which is characterized by an “instrumentalist evisceration of humanistic ways of knowing.” As a corrective, the V21 collective argues for “presentism.” The collective defines presentism, on the one hand, as the use of contemporary theoretical methodologies to engage the Victorian past, but also as the recognition that “the world we inhabit bears the traces of the nineteenth century.” Through “presentism,” the collective thereby hopes to challenge the ways in which “Victorianists are our own and only interlocutors. . . . . [and fail] . . . to imagine paths of argument compelling to scholars who do not care about Victorians as Victorians.” Presentism—what was once seen by many scholars as a bug in historicism—now becomes, intriguingly, a feature. As a nineteenth-century scholar who works primarily on US texts, I admire the forthrightness and polemical energy of this call for “presentism.” Indeed, that different forms of literary historicism offer the possibility to meditate on the present has been one of its most undertheorized and most enacted characteristics. In US literary studies, for example, Jennifer Fleissner has repeatedly asked us to take seriously the work of intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra and his notion of the necessary, complex, and also problematic transference that always occurs between past and present in the historian’s work. Fleissner has carefully demonstrated how presentism

中文翻译：

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保护过去：“现在主义者”历史主义

近年来，我们看到了通过转变我们的理论和方法论范式来振兴文学和文化研究的一系列呼吁。最近的一个是 2015 年的“V21 宣言”，由一个主要从事英国研究的维多利亚时代学者组成。这份文件认为，维多利亚时代的文学和文化研究深陷“实证历史主义”的泥潭，其特点是“工具主义对人文主义认识方式的剔除”。作为纠正措施，V21 集体主张“存在主义”。一方面，该集体将当下主义定义为使用当代理论方法来探讨维多利亚时代的过去，但也承认“我们居住的世界带有 19 世纪的痕迹”。通过“存在主义，”集体因此希望挑战“维多利亚时代的人是我们自己的唯一对话者”的方式。. . . . [并失败]。. . 想象一下对那些不把维多利亚时代当作维多利亚时代的学者来说有吸引力的论证路径。” 现在主义——曾经被许多学者视为历史主义中的错误——现在有趣地成为了一个特征。作为一名主要研究美国文本的 19 世纪学者，我钦佩这种呼吁“现在主义”的直率和争论的能量。事实上，不同形式的文学历史主义提供了沉思当下的可能性，这是其最缺乏理论化和最成熟的特征之一。例如，在美国文学研究中，Jennifer Fleissner 一再要求我们认真对待知识史学家多米尼克·拉卡普拉 (Dominick LaCapra) 的著作以及他关于必要的、复杂的、以及在历史学家的作品中总是发生在过去和现在之间的有问题的转移。Fleissner 仔细地展示了现在主义是如何