WilliamW. Fisher III their contexts. Multiple causation - a complex “circulation” of literary and nonliterary artifacts - is what they expect to find when analyzing any cultural phenomenon.One manifestation of this perspective is that, whereas Contextualists are primarily interested in using discursive and ideological contexts to make sense of ambiguous texts, the New Historicists sometimes reverse the line of inquiry, asking what cultural condition would have had to obtain at the time a particular text was written in order to have generated in the text a particular “formally disturbing ... feature.In other words, the meaning of the context is sometimes inferred fromthe text, rather than vice versa. Finally, New Historicists are much more likely than their methodological rivals to point to multiple, conflicting, polyphonous contexts that surround any given text. Underlying this penchant are some fundamental convictions: Cultures are rarely coherent and unified; groups struggle for discursive power just as they struggle for political dominance. For much the same reason, one should not expect to find in any society a “closed, static, singular and homogenous” ideology; the world-views in circulation will typically be “heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual.”^^ One belief-system is likely to achieve some degree of hegemony, but its grip on the population will inevitably be qualified by “the specific though multiple social positionalities of the spectators, auditors and readers who variously consume cultural productions” and by “the relative autonomy — the specific properties, possibilities and limitations - of the cultural medium” through which the belief-svstem is transmitted.^7 To summarize, since the 1970s, four reasonably distinct alternative methodologies have been debated and applied by intellectual historians: Structural36 Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in Veeser, supra n. 29, 11. Agood illustration of an analysis inspired by this expectation is Richard Helgcrson, “Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Formin Renaissance England,” in Dubrow and Stricr, supra n. 30, 273-92. Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McCann, and Paul Hamilton, Rethinking Historicism(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 59. Montrose, supra n. 29, 22. One of the principal grounds on which the first wave of NewHistoricists criticized the reigning interpretation of the English Renaissance (exemplified by the work of E. M. Tillyard) was that it erroneusly asserted the existence of “a unified, hence ‘hegemonic’ culture in the Renaissance, presumptively stilling all ‘contestation’ in [its] pursuit of an illusory ‘coherence.’” John H. Zammito, “Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophv of History, and ‘Practicing Historians,’of Modern History 65 (1993): 786. Montrose, supra n. 29, 22. In thus distancing themselves froma strong version of the theory of cultural hegemony, the New Historicists are moving in the same direction as several political historians who concern themselves with the concept of ideology. See, e.g., Joyce Appleby, “The American Heritage: The Heirs and the Disinherited, ofAmerican History 74 (1987): 798; Edward Countrvman, “Of Republicanism, Capitalism, and the ‘American Mind,’” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 44 (1987): 556; Ralph Lerner, “The Constitution of the Thinking Ceneration,” in R. Beeman, Stephen Botein, and E. Carter II, eds.. Beyond Confederation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 39.
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