ABSTRACT
Is the New Historicism history? Tellingly, it is the colloquial version of this question that most troubles New Historicists today. In other words, has the methodology that dominated the study of Renaissance and Romantic literature in the 1980s and 1990s become “dated”? Unlike “New Criticism,” the tag “New Historicism” was always consciously oxymoronic, confessing the tension between its “negative” and “positive” phases: between, respectively, a retrospective and dialectical engagement with total material context and a prospective commitment to renewal by constantly challenging forms of normativity. 1 In recent years, however, New Historicism has had to confront the fact that among the unforeseen consequences it embraces is its own possible extinction. Many pioneers of the method now find themselves on the defensive. Thus, in a recent essay, Marjorie Levinson professes surprise that the “new formalism” has gained critical currency despite its failure, broadly speaking, to provide either a coherent theory or a new methodology:
Because new formalism’s argument is with prestige and praxis, not grounding principles, one finds in the literature … no efforts to retheorize art, culture, knowledge, value, or even—and this is a surprise— form…. Neither can we cite the development of new critical methods as the driving force behind new formalism. These essays promote either a methodological pluralism or advise the recovery of one particular method, sidelined or disparaged in current critical practice. 2
As long as this remains the case, she argues, New Historicism will continue to dominate the paradigms through which we read Romantic literature.