Introduction Getting Post-Historical (original) (raw)

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2009

Abstract

Petrarch’s skull and Ovid’s shells, giants’ teeth and book reviews, the Hereford map and the Helgeland film: these are but some of the artifacts collected here as touchstones for reflection upon the place of historicism in the field of medieval literary studies today. We begin with the acknowledgment that historicism has become the Jamesonian “cultural dominant” of our field, one whose posture “allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.”1 Our volume further assumes that historicism’s dominant status ought to mark it, for all medievalists, as an object (or perhaps an artifact) primed for reexamination and redefinition. Through such a “historicizing of historicism,” this collection aims more broadly to encourage a profession-wide interrogation of contemporary critical practices—where they came from, what they mean for their practitioners, and what future orientations they might assume.

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