Introduction

Reflecting in 1996 on the “post-New Historicist” future of Romantic Studies, Alan Liu wondered what new “expanses of history” would be “brought to the table to broaden the taste of the New Historicism for Napoleon”—a figure whose colossal (or was it in fact diminutive?) “usurpative” shadow he had suggestively mapped onto Wordsworth’s Prelude at the beginning of Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989). Ventriloquizing opposition to New Historicism (a New Historicist appropriation of dialectic, catechism, and dialogism), he identified the New Historicist fondness for “displacements on the scale of Napoleon or above.” ² It is unclear whether, in 2008, we are living through the End Days of the “history” of New Historicism; certainly a post-New Historicist Glad Day has not yet fully dawned. So it might still be admissible to confess a taste for Napoleon and for “history” on his scale and above. The disparity between Napoleon’s size in history and his stature in History, of course, makes the frame of reference invoked in the previous sentence appropriately conflicted. Indeed, we might usefully consider the nature of New Historicism’s “Napoleon complex,” the way in which its deeply empowering commitment to broad context hides and compensates for suspect foreshortenings.