New Historicism works offer competing historical and methodological readings

Evidence

For it must be added that the book is structurally ambiguous. When read as a contribution to Renaissance scholarship, what emerges is something quite different from what I have described above, namely, a historical proposition and the tentative sketch of a historical narrative in which an appearance of subjectivity or inwardness seems to emerge at the moment of Tyndale and More (but an appearance only, which oscillates between the security of two institutions), becomes secularized in Wyatt, and then, in the Elizabethan period, is swept into the fictionality and the dramatic pageantry of a new kind of nonsubject, with Marlowe and Shakespeare. Here too the category of the subject is invoked only to be “deconstructed”; but the rudiments of a transcendental historical interpretation remain, which can be used and debated in a very different way. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 434

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s core concern across the book with how the subject is historically constructed and then deconstructed — the non-subject of Elizabethan drama parallels the decentered subject of postmodernism. — connects to: Michaels’ book demonstrates New Historicist method without traditional themes — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 438; New Historicism bans theoretical distance and leaves readers empty-handed — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 432; Historicism analyzes the mutual constitution of war and historical narrative. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 5093 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Michaels’ book demonstrates New Historicist method without traditional themes — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 438; New Historicism bans theoretical distance and leaves readers empty-handed — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 432; Historicism analyzes the mutual constitution of war and historical narrative. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 5093 (+3 more)