Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the current catchy phrases in Renaissance literary criticism is one called "The New Historicism".While this shares some of the techniques and vocabulary of other recent schools (deconstruction, reader response, semiotics), and while it can represent a wide ideological spectrum ranging from American liberalism to British Marxism, it is important to recognize the New Historicism as a movement (it is not exactly a school) separate from those from which its adherents occasionally borrow.If there is a central tenet of New Historicist critics, it is that literary criticismcannot divorce the text from its social and political context: that criticism, in other words, must be a historical as well as a literary exercise.Accordingly, new historicist critics, some of the best of whom are represented in the volume under review, borrow from critics and philosophers (ranging from Marx to Gadamer to Foucault), from a number of political and cultural historians of the early modern period, such as Christopher Hill and Keith Thomas, and from cultural anthropologists including Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz.Now professional historians, long accustomed to using texts for illustrative purposes rather than pursuing their meaning as an end in itself, may have to fight back a smile at the thought that their brethren in English departments are only just discovering that texts are determined in large measure by their historical situations.Have we not been saying this all along?But it is best not to let the "We told you so" issue with too much of a smirk.There is something genuinely new about the new historicism, which makes it more than a rebellion against certain earlier ahistorical schools (most notably New Criticism) and a co-option of others (like deconstruction).And unlike what must now be considered "old" historicism, the historically-based criticism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new historicism generally tries to avoid simplistic interpretations in which literary characters are seen only as veiled references to real persons.The essays in this volume, all previously published in one of the leading journals of new historicism, English Literary Renaissance, set a generally high standard.They are most definitely not for the beginner: even Arthur F. Kinney's prefatory
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".