Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.

Herbert Lindenberger was one of the first literary critics to call for some kind of return to historical thinking in literary criticism. His ten essays cover canon formation, the historical status of genres, and the ways that art and criticism are embedded within institutional frameworks.

Lindenberger argues that, "what we label 'historical' assumes strikingly different shapes in different historical situations" and that present shape empowers new kind of knowledge. He writes, "We may well discover that our century-old form of organization within the humanities no longer fits the type of knowledge we are producing."

The lively and topical essays of "The History in Literature" demonstrate Lindenberger's capacious and diverse knowledge, his incisive wit, and his formidable critical skills.