A quiet yet profound change has been taking place in literary studies during the past ten years or so. Initially it was obscured by the successes and celebrities of Deconstruction, where idealist hermeneutics - this century's dominant textual and interpretative program - led its own tradition into a theoretical impasse. The more recently touted 'return to history' has also obscured the nature of this change - obscured it because the so-called new historicism (I give the name un-capitalised) comprises a variety of historicisms, some new and some not, some idealist and some otherwise.

LRB 18 February 1988 | PDF Download