New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism (review)

Colebrook’s book seeks to “locate new historicism within the general question of historicism” (1) and redefine the very notion of textuality. Thus, her theoretical study explores the definitions and functions of history and the unlimited issues and problems these analyses raise. In the introduction “History, historicism and new historicism,” Colebrook explains that eighteenth century literary criticism “gave rise to historical consciousness” (14) by establishing a distancing from the past. This critical paradigm carried over into the nineteenth century, where historical analysis revealed, Colebrook writes, “past ages as possessing their own meaning and order. Relating to the past would therefore be an act of understanding” (15). She points out that history was used, then, as a hermeneutic tool to determine and decipher the meaning of a given text as well as to chronicle the traditions and changes of literature. But as Colebrook explains, twentieth-century literary criticism raises endless questions regarding the previous definition and function of history.

These analytical issues then developed into critical practices such as formalism, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, and post-colonialism, which have grown out of developments in literary and social theory and philosophy. As for new historicism itself, Colebrook argues that it “has been reluctant to identify itself with any particular theorist or theory” (23) because new historicism “focuses on the way in which social forces produce such boundaries between reality and text, or history and culture. There is no ‘cultural’ domain as such” she specifies. This domain “is either produced by, or productive of, history; rather, the cultural/aesthetic domain is an area of contestation where various forces (aesthetic, political, historical, economic, etc.) circulate” (24), and some of these forces have shown a keen interest in asking what history is and how it can be studied.

Colebrook develops her investigation into new historicism’s progression by addressing the theoretical influences that have shaped this current of critical thought. In chapter 2, “Michel Foucault: archaeology, genealogy and power,” she explains the significant impact Foucault’s work has had on new historicism by stressing the fact that Foucault “problematizes the relationship between text and history” (31). Foucault questions issues regarding power and the creation of the subject while he parts company with traditional historical hermeneutics, which has been working with evolutionary or developmental givens. Further, as Colebrook explains in chapter 3, “Culture and interpretation: anthropology, ethnography and understanding,” anthropologists and ethnographists such as Clifford Geertz analyze history by questioning cultural configurations through observation. Culture should be understood, she argues, “according to its own recipe for order” (70) through “thick description” which provides a way of “thinking beyond the common distinction between formalist and political approaches to a text” (75).

As the author shows in chapter 4, “Pierre Bourdieu: habitus, representation and symbolic exchange,” the work of Bourdieu focuses on establishing the habitus of the text through representations of symbolic exchange within a given culture. However, as Colebrook reminds us, this theoretical approach becomes complicated because history itself has its own habitus. For Bourdieu, “the practice of pure theory depends upon granting a text a certain value” (96) which is determined by interests, “but interests only seek the values which a society, collectively, recognizes” (101). Colebrook deals with these values in the following chapters by examining the contributions to the field of historical analysis by Derrida, de Certeau, Althusser, Machery, Gramsci, and Greenblath.

Colebrook’s work maps out the changes and major influences fashioning the modern development of literary history and historical criticism of culture and charts the way in which the task of literary theory has been assumed. She contends that “new historicism’s ad hoc procedure of reading, its attention to contiguity and circumstance, is perhaps the best strategy literary criticism has produced to disrupt the notions of general interpretive horizons, limits and justifications” (235). Overall, her work provides an excellent critical survey of traditional historical criticism and more recent analytical practices within the expanding field of historicism.