ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that 'history' has emerged as a byword for a certain kind of truth-claim in literary studies. New Historicism nourished and nurtured by historians and art historians had an enormous impact upon the way emerging younger scholars taught and wrote about literature in the late twentieth century. Most historical movies, by contrast, not only reduce history to a simple situation but also strive to give the impression that they are reconstructing what really happened. Antichronology, then, is both old and new: both a resistance to an older notion of historical sequence and development and a rediscovery of familiar categories like genre, theme, and structure. Using historical data anachronistically is different, of course, from the anachronistic use of theoretical ideas. Anachronism or fantasy, which seems to escape historical determination, is intimately connected to it in ways that escape the conscious perception. Thus, in neglecting the historical, literal-minded literary historicists are in reality neglecting the historical.
