The concept of the ‘history of ideas’ is associated with the work and legacy of a single person, the American philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873–1962). Literature, ideas and their possible historical interrelation are, however, problems of very wide interest and import for twentieth-century literary studies. Once the term ‘criticism’ covers all forms of literary study and once ‘ideas’ and their possible history are seen to overlap with – and to contest – other constructions that are available to make sense of literature, the topic of literary criticism and the history of ideas appears as but one version of the problematic relations between literature and history that dominate twentieth-century literary studies.

Lovejoy's masterwork, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea was delivered in 1933 as the William James Lectures at Harvard and published in 1936; it remains, together with some of his collected Essays in the History of Ideas (1948), the signal contribution of the history of ideas to the concerns of literary criticism. Very briefly put, ‘ideas’ for Lovejoy are ‘the persistent dynamic factors … that produce effects in the history of thought’, ‘the elements, the primary and persistent or recurrent dynamic units, of the history of thought’ (pp. 5, 7). In an explicit analogy to chemistry, Lovejoy considers his objects of study to be ‘component elements’ of the larger compounds of thoughts, doctrines or systems in intellectual history, and he wishes to discriminate and trace the workings of such ‘unit-ideas’ (p. 3).