Towards a Poetics of Culture

I feel in a somewhat false position, which is not a particularly promising way to begin, and I might as well explain why.1 My own work has always been done with a sense of just having to go about and do it, without establishing first exactly what my theoretical position is. A few years ago I was asked by Genre to edit a selection of Renaissance essays, and I said OK. I collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, I wrote that the essays represented something I called a “new historicism.” I’ve never been very good at making up advertising phrases of this kind; for reasons that I would be quite interested in exploring at some point, the name stuck much more than other names I’d very carefully tried to invent over the years. In fact I have heard-in the last year or soquite a lot of talk about the “new historicism” (which for some reason in Australia is called Neohistoricism); there are articles about it, attacks on it, references to it in dissertations: the whole thing makes me quite giddy with amazement. In any case, as part of this peculiar phenomenon I have been asked to say something of a theoretical kind about the work I’m doing. So I shall try if not to define the new historicism, at least to situate it as a practice-a practice rather than a doctrine, since as far as I can tell (and I should be the one to know) it’s no doctrine at all.