This is an account of an interview with one of Britain's foremost literary theorists, Professor Catherine Belsey. The interview was conducted in Ghent, Belgium in 1997. The discussion spans all of Belsey's works, from the earliest, Critical Practice (1980), to her latest publication, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999). In this piece, Belsey openly and unpretentiously discusses her feminist commitment, her sometimes controversial critical positions, some of the influences on her careers and the importance to her of her teaching.

In recent discussions of the work of new historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, it has often been remarked that the theory of history underlying their reading practice closely resembles that of postmodern historiographers like Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. Taking off from one such remark, the aim of the present article is twofold. First, I intend to provide a theoretical basis from which to substantiate the idea that new historicism can indeed be taken to be the literary-critical (...) variant of what Frank Ankersmit has termed the "new historiography." In the second half of the article, this theoretical foundation will serve as the starting point of a further analysis of both the theory and practice of new historicism in terms of its distinctly postmodern historiographical project. I will argue that in order to fully characterize the new historicist reading method, we do well to distinguish between two variants of postmodern historicism: a narrativist one and a heterological one . A brief survey of the two methodological options associated with these variants is followed by an analysis of the work of the central representative of new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt. While the significant use of historical anecdotes in his work leaves unresolved the question to which of either approaches Greenblatt belongs, the distinction does serve a clear heuristic purpose. In both cases, it points to the dangerous spot where the new historicism threatens to fall prey to the evils of the traditional historicism against which it defined itself. (shrink)