Better thirty pages of Bateson or Cazamian than three yards of Oxford or Cambridge History of English Literature. Compilations of this kind - awe-inspiring team efforts — differ from integra-tionist history — which, unlike the positivist variety, theorizes in a systematic and comprehensive manner about, among other things, the course of literary history, its peculiar characteristics from period to period, and its relation to life. The theory integrates literature with a non-literary factors which could be, to mention just a few, mental faculties, political institutions, intellectual movements, economics or society. (It goes without saying that it is possible to add to this list.) Thus for Taine English Literature is an expression of the will and the understanding as modified by the famous trinity of race, milieu, and moment. For Cazamian literature from 1660 onwards is an expression, sometimes of intelligence and sometimes of imagination. Courthope discusses the history of English poetry as a reflection of 'the continuous growth of our national institutions'. Grierson relates the cross currents in English literature of the seventeenth century to movements of thought. L.C. Knights discusses drama and society in the age of Ben Jonson as a reflection of contemporary economic life. Bateson sees poetry as a reflection of the contemporary social order, there being five such orders which he arrives at by juggling the categories of "urban", "rural", "individual", and "collective". Thanks to the attempt to integrate literary materials with non-literary elements, history of literature of this kind, unlike positivist history, presents a certain unity of the basic components of information, analysis, and evaluation which produces a narrative fluidity that carries the reader from chapter to chapter. Integrationist history is considered to be "reductionist" - the most damning expression one can use about the work of a scholar. What this literary swear-word implies is that the work in question explains away literature, oversimplifies it, and detracts from its complexity by presenting it as a manifestation of a single element, which is nothing short of a miracle. Reductionism properly understood is an attempt to transcend the immediacy of literary experience and to understand the forces that give rise to literature. In a sense, therefore, responsible reduction-* ism and principled interpretation need not be at loggerheads with one another. However, reductionism is objectionable when it distorts, falsifies or mystifies. And this is precisely what it does in the works I have just mentioned. Taine and Cazamian are "idealistic", asserting the supremacy of consciousness over being, Courthope and Knights are "mechanistic", and, assuming that the expression is not a tautology, Bateson is a "vulgar sociologist". While it is true that they do make some sense out of history, and see a certain pattern in what seemed amorphous before, I am not sure that it is not cancelled out by the nonsense and mystification generated in the process. I must present the Cranian alternative not because it has inspired significant works of literary history but because it might have some seductive charm for the literary formalists, who are interested in studying "literature as literature". January-March 1984 69