Literature, we may say, must in some sense always be an historical study, for literature is an historical art.
—Lionel Trilling
Several years ago I was invited to participate on a panel at the North American Conference on British Studies. I will confess here to a somewhat unseemly delight in the fact that “real historians” seemed to want to listen what I had to say, but I was surprised to discover that the session was entitled “After the New Historicism.” 1 Had this been the meeting of the Midwestern MLA it would not, of course, have been so unexpected, since New Historicism did indeed take root in English studies, and the internal dynamics of the profession made it inevitable that we would soon choose to see ourselves as aggressively
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