Mending the Butterfly: The New Historicism and Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes"

Abstract

Ieveral different kinds of historicism are now being advocated and practiced by literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Common to all of them is the view of literature as the site of an ideological struggle; but some prominent American critics are prepared to show how the written work transcends this struggle, while other more radical critics are only interested in finding material in the work to support their own political stances. Those who practice a more broadly humanist and less strident vein of the New Historicism seem to me the most illuminating. In support of this opinion, I discuss first the development and theoretical premises of this movement, and then how the methodology can be most meaningfully applied. Since Romantic poetry has been a particular butt of the deconstructionists, and now supplies material for some notable Historicists, a quintessentially Romantic poem, Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, has been chosen for this purpose.