ABSTRACT
John Drakakis, in his editor’s Preface to the Routledge series ‘The New Critical Idiom’, claims that the aim of the series ‘is to provide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use, and to evolve histories of its changing usage’. What is called for in such a series, he adds, is ‘an adventurousness of perspective’. David Hawkes and Paul Hamilton, the respective authors of the volumes on Ideology and Historicism, manage in general to meet both sides of this editorial challenge. Each volume summarizes and discusses a wide variety of writers, periods and approaches in concise and lucid prose. At the same time, each volume has a particular theoretical agenda of its own, which helps to unify and make sense of what might otherwise seem a sprawling and unruly theoretical field. There is a certain inevitable tension between the two volumes’ avowed pedagogic responsibilities and the imperatives of their tendentious unifying arguments. Such tension, however, perhaps merely suggests how both ideological or historicist modes of analysis have always existed only within a process of theoretical debate; and that it is impossible to survey that debate without entering into it.
