Submitted by Malcolm B Duncan on December 19, 2005 - 7:30am.
"History is hindsight with blinkers on. We see the source material through someone else’s eyes then reinterpret it. Literary criticism is a somewhat different task. Literary works are like children: we nurture them, cosset them, watch them develop and then send them out into the world to stand or fall on their own. They must make their own way in the face of their audience whatever we intended them to be. There is a tool, however, that the literary critic has that the historian does not. Sometimes, ever so rarely, an insight becomes available to the critic operating like a window on the author’s soul. So it was, gentle reader, that I made one of the most astonishing and significant literary discoveries (long suspected but never before blessed with evidence) in literary criticism as I soared my way through Yorick’s private diaries for the week of Trafalgar Day 1807." Malcolm B Duncan
