Description:
Brook Thomas explores the new historicism and the challenges posed to it by a postmodern world that questions the very possibility of newness. He considers new historicism's engagement with poststructuralism and locates the former within a tradition of pragmatic historiography in the United States.
Review Quotes: "[Thomas] usefully connects the new historicists with earlier American pragmatists, looks closely at the work of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Greenblatt, [and has] interesting things to say about the way the writing of Walter Benjamin complicates and furthers our idea of history."---Michael Wood, The Times Literary Supplement