New historicism envisages and practises a mode of study in which literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other. It is resolutely anti-establishment, always implicitly on the side of liberal ideals of personal freedom and accepting and celebrating all forms of difference and 'deviance'. This chapter describes the critical activities of new historicists and presents an example of new historicism. Cultural materialism combines an attention to historical context, theoretical method, political commitment, and textual analysis. It is often linked in discussion with new historicism, its American counterpart. Political Shakespeare explains some of the differences between the two movements. STOP and THINK sections in the chapter provide the reader with some ‘hands-on’ experience with the subject discussed. It presents Terence Hawkes's essay 'Telmah' as an example of an informal variant of cultural materialism.

This chapter mentions four general shifts or 'settlements' in the intellectual landscape of theory itself. Firstly, theory has become less willing than hitherto to suspend disbelief in the face of vast and speculative intellectual claims. Secondly, there is evidence of a turning away from the dominant materialism epitomised by British cultural materialism and American new historicism. Thirdly, there has been a marked shift away from the 'linguistic sublime'. Finally, a new kind of cultural critique has arisen in response to extreme events such as 9/11, and the global pessimism which is the product of apparently intractable problems such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the spread of religious fundamentalism, and the relentless progress of environmental deterioration. The chapter looks at five areas of development which beginning-theorists might usefully be aware of: presentism, new aestheticism, cognitive poetics, consilience and 'conciliatory' approaches to literary studies, and posthumanism.

This chapter brings three principal French intertexts (and some secondary ones) to bear on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It first argues that Dream evokes a recent play comically adapting Italianate pastoral conventions, La Diane, by Nicolas de Montreux (1594). The next key intertext explored is Le proumenoir (1594), by Marie de Gournay, which offers a feminist slant on the histoire tragique as exemplified by her source, the Champs faëz of Claude de Taillemont. Gournay’s novel presents love as tragic, particularly for women as victims of male inconstancy, as in the legend of Theseus and Ariadne. Gournay introduces this exemplum through the Epithalamium of Catullus, where it counterpoints celebration of a mythical marriage – an effect matching the intrusion of sombre overtones on Shakespeare’s representation of marriage as comic fulfilment. Finally foregrounded is the relation between the burlesque ‘tragedy’ of Pyramus and Thisbe staged by Shakespeare’s Mechanicals and an anonymous Moralité, which illuminates the Mechanicals’ absurd approach to theatrical challenges. Also considered is a poetic reworking of Ovid’s narrative by Antoine de Baïf, which anticipates Shakespeare’s embellishment of this material with humanist trappings. These intertexts highlight the parodic potential Shakespeare exploited in insinuating the fragility of generic boundaries.

This chapter presents the story of literary theory by centring it upon a series of ten key events which constitute its public history. The key events are the Indiana University 'Conference on Style', 1958; the Johns Hopkins University international symposium, 1966; the publication of Deconstruction and Criticism, 1979; the MacCabe affair, 1981; and the publication of Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983. The events also include J. Hillis Miller's MLA presidential address, 1986; the Strathclyde University 'Linguistics of Writing' conference, 1986; the scandal over Paul de Man's wartime writings, 1987-1988; Jean Baudrillard and 'The Gulf War never happened', 1991; and the Sokal affair, 1996. The advantage of doing this is that many of the underlying themes are thereby brought to the fore, so that the trajectory of theory becomes strikingly apparent. The chapter explains the apex of the rise of theory and the beginnings of its decline in the mid-1980s.

Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature. This chapter begins by discussing Sigmund Freud's major ideas related to psychoanalysis. It then explains how Freudian interpretation works. A STOP and THINK section in the chapter helps readers understand the logic of Freudian interpretation. Freud's misreading is seen in the case study usually known simply as 'Dora'. The chapter concentrates on a dream which she related to Freud in the course of the treatment. It lists some activities of Freudian psychoanalytic critics and Lacanian critics, and provides examples of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism and Lacanian criticism. Comparing the Freudian and Lacanian examples will make it immediately apparent that there is an immense gulf between these two approaches, even though they both stem from the same original body of Freudian theory.

Beyond producing original works, the Chartists recontextualised an array of published drama with amateur performances and benefits at professional theatres. Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler illustrates the Chartist use of historical drama as a way to conceptualise history from below, recasting the past as a realm of strife between the people and the ruling classes rather than a march of events driven by the elite. By frequently staging plays about past revolts, Chartist drama placed the contemporary radical movement (and the Newport rising in particular) in a longer history of political conflict. Wat Tyler, which concerns the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt, was first published in 1817 in a pirated version that Southey, who had subsequently become Poet Laureate and renounced his youthful radicalism, fought furiously to suppress. Despite his efforts, this Romantic text continued to circulate widely through the 1840s and was a favourite piece in the Chartist repertoire. The editor’s introduction describes six Chartist performances, which represent the only documented productions of Southey’s notorious drama in nineteenth-century Britain.

By the Anglo-Scandinavian heuristic, travelling in Scandinavia could serve as a virtual trip through time. The region was necessary, familiar, and even, at times, charming. Yet it was the past: what Britain had been and, in an increasingly evolutionary outlook on human experience, what Britain had moved far beyond. Almost like a folk museum, the Nordic region was a place where travellers could talk with people in period costumes, eat period foods, watch period handicrafts being made, buy souvenirs, and walk through a carefully preserved period landscape. The region was necessary, familiar, and even, at times, charming. Yet it was the past: what Britain had been and, in an increasingly stratified view of human experience (Evolutionary Time, according to Johannes Fabian) what Britain had moved far beyond. Clothing, religion, lifestyle, occupations, buildings, personal habits, food – all of these therefore had authentic and immediate interest as what might be called tropes of tactile historiography, potentially revealing something about moral character, whether that of the current Nordic peoples or of the Britons imagined to have evolved from them.

Familiar Letters is usually interpreted as a collaborative venture on the part of Harvey and Spenser and their joint effort to obtain preferment. This chapter shows that Harvey orchestrated the publication without Spenser’s assistance. In Familiar Letters (1580) we are told that Spenser (Immerito) gave copies of the letters to a ‘Well-Willer’ who then gave the correspondence to Harvey’s printer, Henry Bynneman. Brink is the first to point out that ‘Well-Willer’ is an English version of Benevolio, a figure in Harvey’s Letter-Book.The letters themselves are described as ‘scholarly pointes of learning’ because they focus on the science of earthquakes and prosody, not topics of general interest to courtiers or diplomats. The letters are intended to further Harvey’s career in an academic setting. Twelve years later when Harvey discusses the 1580 correspondence, he does not repeat this story, but acknowledges that the correspondence was printed to further his campaign to be University Orator at Cambridge. By references in the letters themselves, Brink shows that Spenser had already become the client of Lord Grey and that he had already received preferment. Spenser had no need to collaborate with Harvey to win preferment.