‘Intensifying the surprise as well as the school’: Stephen Greenblatt interviewed by Noel King.

N.K.: I want to talk to you about your last couple of books, Learning to Curse and Marvelous Possessions.1 Is there a coherent project going on across the two books, perhaps bound up with your notions of ‘cultural poetics’ and ‘new historicism’? They seem connected in some ways, if only because the title essay ‘Learning to curse’ is reworked in a chapter of Marvelous Possessions while the final essay in the collection, ‘Resonance and wonder’, anticipates some of the terminology in Marvelous Possessions.