Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader

Abstract

rflHE relation between feminist criticism and New Historicism i is a peculiar one, exciting considerable interest and curiosity (not to say unease) and, especially in English Renaissance studies, occasioning some unusually acrimonious polemics. The acrimony has to do, at least in part, with the marginal status accorded by one to the other: figuring in each other's discourse at best as a point of departure and at worst as an overlooked point of departure, New Historicists and feminists seem to talk at cross purposes, keeping their mutual distance, relegating each other to a kind of non-presence.1 If the feminist chronicling of women's oppression and celebration of women's difference have appeared misguided to many New Historicists, the New Historicist universalization of power and blurring of genders have struck many feminists as nothing short of reactionary.2