Testing Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism

While New Historicism is spreading into other disciplines and continues to produce valuable studies, Greenblatt’s politics, methodology and scholary standards have come increasingly under attack. This essay endeavours to review and contextualize the various contributions to this debate in Critical Self-Fashioning: Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism, an anthology edited by Jürgen Pieters (Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Peter Lang, 1999). Among other things, it is remarkable that, in this interesting anthology, the role of the imagination in constructing the past and the importance of the aesthetic dimension in the reception of a literary work, which has been so sadly neglected by the non-poetic branch of New Historicism, once more enter the field of critical discussion