Renaissance Literary Studies after Theory: Aesthetics, History and the Human

Recently voiced concerns that the study of literature has become the study of history has led to a resurgence of interest in aesthetics. This essay assesses some of the implications of this work for Renaissance literary studies and the impact that it has already had. However, rather than setting historicism and aestheticism in stark and simple opposition, the essay takes the condition of literary criticism ‘after theory’ to be an opportunity to overcome polarizations which have in any case often been more of a convenient shorthand than a reality. The essay argues, for example, that the new cultural historicisms frequently aestheticise history and that other putative oppositions, between the human and the historical, the universal and the particular, feeling and intellect, and ‘evangelical’ and ‘sceptical’ attitudes towards literature, are misleading not least because literature itself straddles these divides. The notion of being ‘after theory’ should not be taken to mean that we have somehow moved beyond the need to be reflexive or to identify the assumptions which underlie critical practice, but that the assumed antagonisms upon which certain influential forms of theory have rested, that, for example, the cultural construction of literature undermines its universality, can now themselves be questioned.