Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts Through Cultural Historicism

by Albert H. Tricomi

In an assessment of the new historicism as a form of historical knowledge, Albert Tricomi moves beyond it to present what he calls new cultural historicism. In pursuing this theme, he examines Tudor-Stuart representations of surveillance and the cultural oversight of the sexual body as revealed in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama to bring together two discourses that have not been joined before.

Tricomi shows the inadequacy of an older, event-based historical criticism that excludes various forms of cultural knowledge, including metaphor and states of mind as revealed in literary texts. At the same time, he demonstrates a more robust historicism by joining functional cultural analyses to a conception of historical understanding that can recognize both events and processes.

Tricomi suggests new and controversial possibilities of what historicized literary studies might be. His study will contribute to the emergence of a more extensive and vigorous cultural historicism.

Albert H. Tricomi is professor of English and vice provost for undergraduate studies at Binghamton University, SUNY, and author or editor of numerous articles and books, including Anticourt Drama in England, 1603-1642; "Alfrede or Right Reinthron'd": A Translation of Drury's "Alvredus sive Alfredus," a Critical Edition; and Early Drama to 1600.

1996. 216 pp. 6 X 9.

Notes, bibliography, index.

ISBN 0-8130-1435-2
Cloth, $55.00

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"One of the best critiques of new historicism currently available... this book is highly recommended; its bibliography is excellent, its notes careful and suggestive. The intelligent, focused, and specific critique of new historicism alone is worth the price of the book."-- Choice

"This book has many things to recommend it. Tricomi's summary and analysis of the historiography of the new historicism is as good as any that has been attempted, and he offers fresh and insightful readings of the literary texts. Finally, his measured and informed suggestions for ways to enlarge and to improve the new historicist initiative should serve as a welcome model for all scholars who want to present a complex and compelling picture of the past."-- Sixteenth Century Journal

"Takes on in an intelligent and learned, appreciatively critical way the potent current literary critical movement of new historicism."-- Ira Clark, University of Florida

"The best critical examination of the New Historicist methods that have seemingly monopolized literary cultural criticism over the past fifteen years. . . . A wise, moderate book."-- Stephen Collins, Babson College