Is literary history really history? What is its relation to literary theory? In Theory and the Evasion of History, David Ferris ranges from the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle to nineteenth-century criticism, poetry, and fiction to examine the relation of literature to history as a subject of both theoretical and thematic importance. Focusing on the intellectual debts of the literary interpretations of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Eliot, Ferris identifies an "evasion" that literary history and literary theory cannot help but perform if they are to maintain themselves as disciplines.

"The evasion," he writes, "may be quite readily discerned in those shifts which are traditionally evoked by literary history in order to distinguish...an Aristotelian from a Romantic model of literature or even a shift from Romanticism's preoccupations with imagination, language, and literary tradition to the social and historical concerns which tend to dominate the interpretation of a narrative such as George Eliot's Middlemarch." In examining these shifts, Ferris identifies an essential pattern that informs not only the various theoretical and critical positions adopted in the name of deconstruction but also the historical critiques of these positions. He then points out the difficulty of developing a deconstructive criticism unmarked by a predicament that defines the course of literary history. In Ferris's reading, the evasion of such a predicament enables the history that such a criticism would deconstruct.