REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 11 (1995)

In the past 15 years. literary studies have witnessed a radical historical and political turn which has come to dominate the field of English and American literary criticism. The contributions to this volume of REAL reasses the strengths and weaknesses of this historical turn and the subsequent forms of political criticism which have developed in its wake. They reexamine the theoretical claims of New Historicism and other new approaches, and - in applying the procedures of New Historicism to an analysis of its own historicity - describe the recent radical revision in literary studies as a cultural practice that can be explained as response to often unacknowledged historical and professional contexts. Essays range from theoretical discussions of major figures and projects of the new revisionism to state-of-the-art examples of a historically oriented interpretive practice.