The New Historicism in Contemporary Literature and Media Culture

Throughout the last years, historical settings have become surprisingly popular in novels, films, and TV series. The project investigates the implications of this boom for the social, cultural, and media spheres, as well as for the theory of history.

It seems as if an age which, according to general consensus, is suffering from tremendous pressure to accelerate, while also struggling with the loss of positive visions for the future, develops a particular fascination with the past. However, the medial depiction of this past no longer provides a useful framework for understanding the present, as did Reinhart Koselleck’s “collective singular” history. In New Historicism, history once again disintegrates into (hi)stories that are often tinted by nostalgia. In this way, it shares certain similarities with the “first” or “old” historicism of the 19th century. Some of New Historicism’s excesses may even pursue the strategy of a more comprehensive musealization of culture, something that philosophers such as Hermann Lübbe have considered a response to a “loss in familiarity due to a change in tempo.”

Today, however, we can only solve these issues through intermedial comparisons and from a global perspective. What role does digitalization play in the spread of New Historicism? On the one hand, the aesthetic treatment of the past seems to resist the constraints of a permanent life in real time. On the other hand, historical settings are often spread through digital media. But how do literary texts react to this tension? Do they depict them, or do they seek ways to escape them in the very places where they participate in the boom in historical material?

How do such media differences manifest themselves from an intercultural and global perspective? Is the nation still a dominant category in New Historicism? Or is it becoming one again? Is New Historicism an exclusively “global Northern” product? How do historiographic passages in contemporary novels from the “global South” relate to New Historicism? Are they secretly dismissing it as a politically oblivious luxury? Or is New Historicism maybe proof of a self-provincialization of Europe (Dipesh Chakrabarty), which would mean that it operates on the level of critical globalization discourses?