After History: Textuality and Historicity in the New Historicism

Abstract

When Stephen Greenblatt announced the arrival of the new historicism in 1982, he defined it as a practice which was ‘set apart from both the dominant historical scholarship of the past and the formalist criticism that partially displaced this scholarship in the decades after World War Two’ (Greenblatt 1982, 5). New historicism represented (itself as) a significant shift away from the kind of literary studies wherein the literary text was conceived to be an ahistorical linguistic structure, or the literary text was measured against a crude historical background. Along with some Marxist and feminist critics, and cultural materialism in Britain, the new historicism came to be known as the turn to history in literary studies. In his presidential address to the Modern Language Association in 1986, Hillis Miller claimed that the turn to history was dominating literary studies: As everybody knows, literary study in the past few years has undergone a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such and has made a corresponding turn toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base in the sense of institutionalization, conditions of production, technology, distribution, and consumption of ‘cultural products’, among other products. This trend is so obvious everywhere as hardly to need description. How many symposia, conferences, scholarly convention sessions, courses, books and new journals recently have had the word history, politics, society or culture in their titles? (Miller 1991, 313)