Practicing new historicism

Publication date 2000 Topics Criticism, Historicism Publisher Chicago : University of Chicago Press Collection internetarchivebooks; printdisabled Contributor Internet Archive Language English Item Size 931.9M

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Reviewer: Porlock - favorite favorite favorite favorite - September 30, 2019
Subject: New Historism and perhaps a New Poet's Corner.

Not for the faint hearted, this book will test the mettle of even committed readers. It will be best understood by those who are familiar with the histories of the various methods of representing literary texts and the manner of such texts being representative of their time.

The Introductory preface outlines the values and strengths of a way of approaching the study of literature, a method that is interesting enough, particularly the use of anecdotes (one pillar) by literary scholars and historians who find in the telling detail or anecdote, representatives of a culture or literary epoch which are 'true' or evidential and which we are lead to, not so much believe but, consider as valid indicators of life at a time before our own.

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis is employed as a representative example or sounding board for this method, his select and much lauded extractions of literary texts which he chose to serve as synecdoches or metonymies for a cultural epoch.

The place of such a method in the formation of the literary canon is given implicit and explicit consideration as the reader confronts a method which aims at being broadly representative, so avoiding the high-church exclusiveness of other approaches to the study of literature.

The problems facing a literary scholar are implicitly fleshed out as writing about literature entails sampling, samples which end up on the curricula not just of universities but of schools and so the discussion, not easy to follow unless one is versed in some familiarity with 'perplexing idiolects', has important uses as the discussions represent the direction English Studies is headed in.

What trickled down as the culture wars late 1980s/early 1990s challenge to mostly white dead male authors finds its origins in books and methods like this one as a more inclusive representative literature curriculum is broadly welcomed and embraced within a method which wants to reclaim (another pillar) the forgotten voices of people who published but whose work has 'vanished' or which remains out of print.

Resisting the notion implicitly that market forces shape the literary canon, New Historicism's appeal is to level the cultural, racial and gender playing fields by a more inclusive representative literature, not to displace dead white authors in a zero sum game of quotas but for minority literature and authors to take their place alongside the revered members of the canon.