Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance

Abstract

Among the current catchy phrases in Renaissance literary criticism is one called "The New Historicism".While this shares some of the techniques and vocabulary of other recent schools (deconstruction, reader response, semiotics), and while it can represent a wide ideological spectrum ranging from American liberalism to British Marxism, it is important to recognize the New Historicism as a movement (it is not exactly a school) separate from those from which its adherents occasionally borrow.If there is a central tenet of New Historicist critics, it is that literary criticismcannot divorce the text from its social and political context: that criticism, in other words, must be a historical as well as a literary exercise.Accordingly, new historicist critics, some of the best of whom are represented in the volume under review, borrow from critics and philosophers (ranging from Marx to Gadamer to Foucault), from a number of political and cultural historians of the early modern period, such as Christopher Hill and Keith Thomas, and from cultural anthropologists including Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz.Now professional historians, long accustomed to using texts for illustrative purposes rather than pursuing their meaning as an end in itself, may have to fight back a smile at the thought that their brethren in English departments are only just discovering that texts are determined in large measure by their historical situations.Have we not been saying this all along?But it is best not to let the "We told you so" issue with too much of a smirk.There is something genuinely new about the new historicism, which makes it more than a rebellion against certain earlier ahistorical schools (most notably New Criticism) and a co-option of others (like deconstruction).And unlike what must now be considered "old" historicism, the historically-based criticism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new historicism generally tries to avoid simplistic interpretations in which literary characters are seen only as veiled references to real persons.The essays in this volume, all previously published in one of the leading journals of new historicism, English Literary Renaissance, set a generally high standard.They are most definitely not for the beginner: even Arthur F. Kinney's prefatory

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