“Cut in more subtle angles”: History, Historicisms, and the Art of Representation

Abstract

In this essay, Anthony Parr examines Kevin Sharpe’s trilogy on images of rule in the light of the New Historicist “turn” in study of early modern culture. He considers the ways in which these three books take the Revisionist historical project into a postmodern debate about whether the chronicle of the past can be described as anything other than a set of competing narratives or representations, all of which are available to us only as texts or images. He finds Sharpe ultimately committed to a belief in historical evidence that yields a trove of information about all of the reigns examined but also raises questions about the focus on a conception of power and authority vested almost exclusively in the monarch. From the perspective of literary studies, this analysis of Sharpe’s project asks where his study of historical representation might take us and how future work can avoid the intellectual cul-de-sacs of postmodern relativism and purely instrumental readings of literature.