NEW HISTORICISM AND RENAISSANCE CULTURE

A Renaissance of Political Culture?

SHAKESPEARE , CULTURE , NEW HISTORICISM UDC 821 . 111 . 09 : 821 . 111 - 2 Shakespeare

In the 1980s, New Historicism was a strikingly innovative way of examining literary history, as well as practicing literary theory. Greatly influenced by the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, New Historicists in America and their British counterparts, Cultural Materialists, set to rewrite the history of Western literature in such a way as to challenge what they considered the socio-p...

new historicism

new historicism

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Prologue: The culture of Renaissance instrumental music

In Renaissance courts and cities, instrumental music was deeply woven into the fabric and function of everyday life, and was accessible to a wide, demographically diverse swath of the populace. Domestic entertainment, civic and village events, courtly ritual, and the functional, clockwork activities of a city, court, or militia, all demanded the contributions of instrumentalists. The wide diver...