By way of beginning, it is worth considering whether content-based interpretations should concern themselves with historical context at all. If one is interested in the ideas in a text, why does it matter where they come from, or even whether they are really there? With apologies to J. Hoberman and Noël Carroll, we might call this a history of ideas version of the Plan 9 from Outer Space problem. Carroll writes:

How should one regard it when a text is accidentally genius, so to speak? Presentist critics are, as they say frequently, uninterested in history for its own sake. So if there is a surprising connection between a text from the past and something we care about, why does it matter how authors came to write the books they did? If some readers find the content of a text interesting and insightful insofar as it speaks to some problem they are thinking about, then it seems at least prima facie questionable to insist on the work's historical context, even if (let us suppose) the connection between the issue the reader is thinking about and the work of art is insubstantial and arbitrary, disappearing once the fuller context is taken into account.

This is a deep problem that does not admit of an easy solution, and variations on the problem have occurred in a variety of fields. Correspondingly my argument here proceeds accretively, connecting up different versions of the Plan 9 problem to elaborate a clearer way of thinking about the competing intuitions at work in it.