Volume 48, Number 11 · July 5, 2001
Art Among the Ruins
By Frank Kermode
Practicing New Historicism
by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt
University of Chicago Press, 249 pp., $25.00
Shakespeare After Theory
by David Scott Kastan
Routledge, 264 pp., $18.99 (paper)
New Historicism emerged as an influential movement in the 1980s with Stephen Greenblatt's early studies in Renaissance culture, and Greenblatt, who reluctantly takes credit for inventing the label, remains its most eminent practitioner. Broadly speaking, New Historicism is a way, or a bundle of ways, of writing about literary history which incorporates insights provided by other intellectual disciplines, refuses to isolate literature from other forms of discourse, and assumes that the entire culture, including many aspects of it generally overlooked by conventional history—for instance, anecdotes concerning the lives and behavior of ordinary people—can be regarded as text, with all of its parts somehow interrelated. A typical essay of Greenblatt's will begin with an anecdote of the kind he himself calls 'outlandish,' coming from well outside the range of normal historiography, and attending, for example, to transvestism, riots, exorcisms, or life in peasant villages.
Review, 6228 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |