1 - Historicism and historical criticism

Summary

Old and new historicisms

Recent critiques of historical methodology have inaugurated a radically revised understanding of art, culture and society. Literary criticism has been at the forefront of these developments, an especially articulate advocate of their utility and their timeliness. The innovations of this new historicism, though, are bound to recapitulate old historicisms to some extent. In the heat of critical reaction to what went before, pioneers are inclined at first to neglect still earlier precursors of their own interpretative practice. Opponents of new historicism are, of course, quick to attack its claims to newness. In so doing, though, their criticism itself becomes historicist, one which historicises the historicisers. Historicism ought therefore to welcome their corrections. Indeed, the stage that historicist criticism has now reached is one which is keen to become more learned in past attempts to depart from a purely linear account of history, a chronology, in order to detect the art of historiography at work. An analysis of its rhetoric has thus become increasingly important. The tropes history uses, the choices it makes between the different kinds of available narrative, the realism which concerns of the present can bestow on supposedly correlative movements of the past are considered part of history's content. Critical fashion, in other words, may be historically informative, and the most critical aspect of historicism concerns the question of whether past and present concerns are so inextricable that they are in fact troping each other. Hayden White, in his immensely influential book Metahistory, found his major precedents for this historical self-consciousness in nineteenth-century German historical method. The following chapter acknowledges earlier anticipations of current historicism while seeking to do justice to the idioms which it typically draws on now.