Circulating Representations: New Historicism and the Poetics of Culture

NEW HISTORICISM, LIKE ALL THE OTHER ISMS of our time, has rapidly become a catch-word, a label, under which the heterogeneous is re-packaged and marketed as the more or less homogeneous. The intellectual reality of New Historicism in fact discloses a variety of sins or virtues or a mix of both depending on one’s point of view (the points of view themselves of course vary in that from its inception to the present “New Historicism” has been an object of fierce and continuing controversy). For example, in the very fine book by Graham Bradshaw on Shakespeare, we will find, convincingly demonstrated, fundamental differences, at least in the case of Shakespearean interpretation, between American New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Stephen Greenblatt) and British New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield).