Marc Bloch, co-founder of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, once wrote: ‘Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.’ There is a widespread assumption among New Historicists and Cultural Materialists that older forms of historical thinking, at least in literature departments, were naive and unsophisticated, and that it took ‘the clarity of focus provided by the new critical paradigms of our own day’, as one recent critic puts it, to make us aware of the problems involved in reconstructing the past. In our Introduction we trace the history of historicism in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that historicist thinking, in literature as well as history departments, was a good deal more subtle than New Historicists and Cultural Materialists have been generally willing to acknowledge. While accepting some of the recent postmodern critique of traditional historical empiricism, we argue that there are rational criteria for adjudicating between rival historical narratives and interpretations. We also claim that, while literary scholars and historians may share a common methodology, there is a role for literary criticism which goes beyond historical reconstruction and which includes a continuing responsibility for making aesthetic, moral, and political judgments. Finally, we argue that, in the light of the current wealth of neo-Darwinian studies of all political complexions, it is time to reconsider the anti-essentialism that has become a sine qua non of much New Historicist and Cultural Materialist scholarship.

To signal our recognition of the importance both of the historicist tradition and of recent work in postmodern historiography, we have chosen the term ‘neo-historicism’ for our title. Neo-historicism embraces the following principles: