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Historicism is by far one of the most polemic concepts in contemporary historical thought. However, despite the polysemy generated by its controversial character, the term is generally defined in i...

Focusing on the case of the tourist visiting battlefield monuments at Waterloo, this article explores how war is historicized in the public imagination through the monumentalization of objects. The...

This article theorises epistemologies of ‘space’ in critical studies on terrorism, expanding the research agenda beyond the straitjacket of historicism and discourse-centrism. It traces two theoret...

In the age of historicism, stylistic choices were simultaneously projections of identity. At the same time, the idea that the recovery of a historic style would also resurrect the “spirit” of a par...

Recent commentaries on the resurgence of populist nationalism have referred back to the early twentieth century. Such analogies are criticised by scholarly historians, but in a frame of post-humani...

This paper interprets Dilthey’s treatment of history and historical science through his engagement with Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. It focuses on Dilthey’s account of the possibility of ob...

Recent research at the intersection of music and science has described standards of musical pitch as the result of an increasing circulation of actors and artefacts and the rise of science in the m...

How did the Western university, originally a Christian institution, become a predominantly secular one? This article briefly surveys the main scholarly approaches to secularization, identifying a h...

For the last 40 years or so, historicist studies of the relations of literature and science have been shaped by the idea of there being fundamental similarities between literary and scientific crea...

The nascent subfield of the anthropology of history criticizes the historicist bent of Western historiography and calls for attention to alternative historicizing practices, especially non-Western ones. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, I argue that former Lebanese and Palestinian detainees held in Syria have developed a range of such practices in order to have their testimonies about their detention taken seriously in Lebanon. Against a background of institutionalized amnesia and deep political and sectarian divisions, the state refuses to treat them as political detainees. Other publics are more sympathetic, but the ability of ex-detainees to persuade them is limited by these audiences' historicist presuppositions, particularly their expectations that detainees' accounts rely on a linear chronology with a clear progression from past to present and that detention narratives provide evidence that can be critically compared and corroborated. In this regard they also implicitly reject the model, bequeathed by the Holocaust, of the inarticulate victim as guarantor of a testimony's authenticity. Consequently, the anthropology of history should resist the temptation to map historicist and non-historicist forms of history onto a West/non-West split.

This article’s chief contention is that the decisive context of Jacques Derrida’s 1988 Critical Inquiry essay on Paul de Man’s past was the oscillation between the collapse of the historici...

At the dawn of the twentieth century, styles synonymous with the French Old Regime were hailed as the epitome of good taste. French fashions from the reigns of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI were an international luxury brand, the proliferation of which seemed to announce the rise of “new money” and transatlantic alliances. This was a defiantly cosmopolitan and opulent mode of building and decorating, which was often dissonant with its immediate surroundings. Taking the example of Oldway Mansion in Devon – created by the American entrepreneur Isaac Merritt Singer in the 1870s and transformed by his son Paris Eugène Singer in the 1890s into a the “Versailles of the West Country” – this article reflects on the elusive but pervasive contribution of Jews to the popularity of French revivalism in the fin-de-siècle. It argues for the entanglement of Jewishness with other national and class identities and insists on considering not just the identity of the patron or the architect, but the wider network of artists, decorators and art dealers who specialized in recreating the elegance of the Old Regime. It explores what role Jewish patrons and art professionals played in disseminating French historicist styles among a dynamic, global elite.

This article demonstrates the unique role of the Russian philosophical tradition (“positive philosophy”) in the formation of an individual’s self-consciousness and attempts to overcome the limitati...

Anuradha Chatterjee’s book tries to unlock the complex issues involved in Ruskin’s consideration of the fabric of architecture as hinted in the title of the book. She covers the literature relevant...

German-born, Paris-based Karl Lagerfeld was one of fashion’s most remarkable figures. Lagerfeld’s great versatility provides us with a unique opportunity, within fashion studies, for inter-discipli...

Jonathan Sachs’s The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism and Jonathan Crimmins’s The Romantic Historicism to Come both begin by reading Romantic encounters with scenes of ruin, and, in turn, ...

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. By considering new scholarship on the social distribution of cognition, artificial intelligence (AI) and philosophies of mind, this article suggests another epistemology for research in history. The contrast of new models of AI with old existentialist phenomenologies of being-in-time now suggests how meaningful action can operate without representations. These issues affect research in history. ‘Picturing’ theories of mind grounding Historicist and Poststructuralist academic historiographies are here re-appraised against these new trends. History research is found to be also now a quasi-ethnographic ‘ontological’ study of life-worlds in past being. The new epistemology I suggest here is a hermeneutic of inferences of descriptive disclosure of situated human predicaments.

This article questions the idea that Irish literary modernism is defined by Irish postcoloniality. The continued influence of historicist approaches in literary studies have inspired an und...

In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss accused Edmund Burke of being ignorant of the nobility of last-ditch resistance; defending a conception of history that set the path for historicism; and d...

Rhodri Lewis’s book manifests the strengths and weaknesses of the historicist approach to thought championed by Quentin Skinner. In his acknowledgements, Lewis thanks Skinner, one of the colleagues...

The essay by Craig Brandist confronts those of us engaged in the theoretical humanities with the question of critique. Certainly, the current conjuncture, despite appearances to the contrary, is no...

Interpreters of the political theory of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss have frequently noted the deep disagreements between the two over both the meaning of political theory and, more importantly, t...

Within the framework of Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, significant modern architects dialogued with Japanese Culture. Such is the case of the Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond who developed an extensive work in Japan pursuing a quest of synthesis between the West and Japan. Soon, followed Rudolf Schindler and his comrade Richard Neutra, previously qualified as architects in Vienna, whence Japonism represented a sensation to the cultural circles of the epoch. This article discusses the proposals of the trio, stressing the consistency in relationship to Japanese culture and its inherent link with Nature, pillar of Daoist philosophy. The authors intend to demonstrate that theirs was a deliberate search for the uncertain direction of modern architecture, once it was unleashed from dusk cliches of historicism, especially for distant and promising lands. We conducted this between Japan, Europe and the USA and consulted original documents in the archives of Columbia, UCLA, the Toyo Bunko in Tok...

The changes within temporality, the rise of presentism, and the emergence of ersatz nostalgia as the cultural consequences of late capitalism are producing a pseudo-historicist perspective as a way of dealing with the past. This article claims that the rising interest in the Ottoman Past in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) is not just the product of the conservative cultural perspective of the ruling party but also the result of the pseudo-historicism produced by the long-term transformation of the Turkish society since the 1980s. This article takes the architectural production as an exemplification to illuminate the pseudo-historicist perspective in the Turkish context, because architecture appears as the most important terrain which reflects the development of this interest in the Ottoman past due to its characteristic as a profession closely knitted with the economy, and its representational power mirroring the cultural.

When the illustrated newspaper was “invented” in 1842, festivals soon became prime content for the young Illustrated London News. Presenting festivals from home and abroad, illustrated papers were full of images and descriptions of spectacle in motion – including spectacular architecture and people. What was the relationship between the crowd and the building, in word and image, and how did it relate to the role architecture played in the public sphere? This article argues that the increasing plasticity of the text, alongside the rising dominance of the image, turned printing from a static medium into an interactive one. The page transformed from a surface into a space that could capture figures and buildings in flux. As styles multiplied in the age of historicism, text and image in the Illustrated London News provided an immersive, yet highly controlled, experience of the metropolis and its events.

James Brady was a mid twentieth-century Indigenous political organiser, trapper, prospector, writer, and intellectual. He was also a prolific photographer. This article considers the significance a...

Historicist and materialist feminist criticisms have shown how early modern gender ideology associated women’s speech and writing with sexual looseness (Newman 40, 10–11; Callaghan, Women and Gende...

This is a paper about a possible philology. To help envisage it, I draw on three recent books which between them speak of two kinds of readerly love: love of the word, and love of literature; I exa...

This essay explores a series of sovereign ‘machines’ – slaves, puppets, automata – in political theory from Benjamin to Agamben. It is now well-documented that the philosophical question of ‘the machine’ – of whether a complex system requires a human operator or whether it can function autonomously – is also a crucial political question that haunts every discussion of sovereignty from Hobbes onwards. However, my wager in what follows is that this machine is not just a metaphor for a metaphysical situation – whether it be rationality (Hobbes), bureaucratization (Weber), neutralization (Schmitt), historicism (Benjamin) or governmentality (Foucault) – but a material phenomenon that carries transformative political promise and threat. To summarize the argument of this essay, I contend that ‘sovereign machines’ like slavery (Aristotle, Hegel, Kojève, Agamben), puppets, automata or clockwork (Descartes, Hobbes, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida), lens, optics and mirrors (Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault) and so on do not merely reflect but change our understanding of the causal relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, decision and norm, exception and rule. If the self-appointed task of the modern political theorist has so often been to obtain or regain sovereignty of, or over, the machine – to jam its gears – I seek to expose what the later Derrida calls the ‘machine’ of sovereignty itself. In conclusion, I argue that political theory’s attempt to reveal or retroactively invent the sovereign person at the heart of the machine only ends up revealing the sovereign machine at the heart of the person. What – if anything – is really inside the machine of sovereignty?

How can a poem be read for its contingency? Can contingency be figured in or by a poem? (Which poem? When? Read how, and by whom?). This essay describes a US ‘contingency poetics’ of the 1990s, and weighs its claims against a sampling of twentieth-century poems preoccupied with contingency, some written under the sign of this poetics, some not. It does so to explore the critical conundrums that attend thinking about poetry’s possible relations to ‘contingency’ – including poetry’s reputation for generic resistance to it – in part to articulate a knot of interpretive challenges central to the history of criticism of the 1990s, from the status of ‘narrative’ in poetry to the persistence of lyric reading in avant-garde criticism. There are challenges herein described still relevant for this historicist reader of poems, and that have bearing on how, as critics, we imagine our narrative labours on behalf of poems.

SUMMARY: This paper examines some of the philosophical and epistemological issues surrounding current theories of political economy. By focusing on the historicism that postcolonial theorists have employed to critique the writings of Karl Marx and the lack of focus on the environment on the part of many political theorists, this paper argues for a political economy that accommodates the role of the disenfranchised and the environment as part of an archaeology of the future.

This essay observes the historical context in which tea gowns emerged within the world of high fashion in the last forty years of the nineteenth century. Evidence is presented that serves to questi...

The rise of historicism at the turn of the 19th century changed the ancient poetics and rhetoric standards held by Aristotle for a long time,trying to integrate literary studies into a larger histo...

This article offers a fresh look at historical costume design in nineteenth-century productions of Shakespeare, in England and Germany, in light of recent critical theory about the power of objects on stage. Using case studies from Charles Kean and the Meininger Theatre, it explores how costumes conveyed different kinds of ‘truth’, and examines the tensions between historicism, spectacle, and theatre. I argue that early directors drew on the popularity and authority of historically accurate costume-objects to blur the boundary between highbrow and lowbrow theatre. Charles Kemble and Kean used historical costumes to legitimate lavish spectacle on stage, under the guise of education; Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen went a step further, often using historical costumes but ultimately making a case for the dramaturgical value of all aspects of design, whether accurate or abstract. Further, I suggest that we reconsider the emerging relationship between directors, text, and design, arguing for the importance ...

Much has been written on Ayi Kwei Armah's disavowal of African revolution/independence and his radical imaginative recreation of African past in his early and middle fiction respectively. However, even when his radical, Afrocentric discourse is underscored and his mythical (re)construction of the black nation's past is unveiled, they are not linked to the Eurocentric philosophies against which they are deployed. This article, therefore, seeks to track the call for change in Armah's middle works, and to reread his narrative and discourse in Two Thousand Seasons in contradistinction to western progressive thought and evolutionary ethics, which spawned western historicism and legitimated imperialism in the 19th century. Approached from this perspective, Armah's ideological and ethical construct of ‘the Way’ acquires an additional meaning, and his yearning for a true revolutionary change achieves a wider and more concrete sense.

The authors discuss two interpretations of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology: by Lev Shestov and by Gustav Shpet. While each of these thinkers followed his own path, they shared an idea of historicism...

Taking up Maurice Blanchot’s perceptive claim that “Surrealism remains always of our time”, the essay traces the importance of Surrealism for rethinking the methods of historiography (for Walter Benjamin) and ethnography (for James Clifford) in ways that allow us to appreciate the significance of Surrealism’s intellectual legacy. In his early essays on Surrealism and the monumental, unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin developed a new historical methodology, what I term surrealist historiography, that sought to uncover the latent dimensions of culture, obscured by the dazzling sheen of progress embedded within conventional historical narrative. If Benjamin found in Surrealism a way to overcome the limitations of a Rankean historicism, the point of departure for Clifford’s essay, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” is the crisis of ethnographic authority precipitated by a postcolonial critique of the discipline of anthropology. Clifford’s aim in this essay is thus to provide a provocative reasse...

Late nineteenth century scholars accepted the traditional narrative of Māori colonisation occurring c. 600 years earlier by systematic voyaging in multiple canoes. Amplification and revision of tra...

Two urban discourses occurred before and after 1970 with their differences and similarities: the first indebted to the functionalism of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and critical of tradition, and the second resulting from 1970s historicist reaction which, critical of the CIAM, focussed on the revival of traditional forms. Here, we analyse two urban approaches in a single geographical location: Baranain, located in the region of Pamplona (Navarra, Spain). The two plans (1967 and 1984) correspond to these urban discourses. Yet, on analysing them, we can see that the original discourses contain a hint of discipline-related mismatch, since – in both cases – places the criticism of previous designs before the social or geographical conditions.

This essay situates the pioneering quantitative methodology of the poet-critic Josephine Miles in the early new-critical period, when the reading practices associated with modern literary studies were taking hold of the incipient discipline—often at the expense of romantic poetry. Skeptical of ideals of autonomy and unity, Miles’s descriptive historicism veers between “close criticism” and what we now call distant reading. Her early work on nineteenth-century poetry as well as her archived word-counting notes challenge the New Critics’ obsession with the shape and wholeness of the poem, adding nuance to our sense of the evolving academic hegemony of formalism in the 1940s while also suggesting new ways of understanding the recent digital turn.

In this paper I argue that Leonardo Sciascia inscribes himself into a Siculo-Arab literary history, an inscription articulated through the historiographic metafiction of the novel Il Consiglio d’Egitto, the reception of the Sicilian poet of Arabic tongue Ibn Ḥamdīs, and the rewriting of a Giufa folktale. Influenced by the nineteenth-century Orientalist Michele Amari, Sciascia fashions Sicily’s Muslim past into a precursor of a Mediterranean modernity. Sciascia’s paradoxical vision of Arab Sicily is suspended between a fundamental historicism and an Orientalist essentialism, positing a Sicilian character that is both unchanging and the product of the island’s history of foreign invasions. The fictional investigations of Sicily’s Arab history provide Sciascia with an answer to the question of how one can be Sicilian, an answer that entails the responsibility of the historian, and the need to uncover a past that can guide us into an uncertain future.

To preserve their professional identity, archivists need to recognize that their core expertise is the protection of evidence for upholding rights, but that any rights framework is historically contingent. Engaging primarily with other activities, in particular with support for historical research, rather than developing and using this specific, specialist expertise, may ultimately be self-defeating if archivists wish to preserve a stable professional identity meriting both societal recognition and support. Taking a historical perspective, using examples of documented archival practice in pre-Revolutionary France, it is argued that contemporary archivists would benefit from acknowledging that their core functions derive not from servicing historical research, but in the protection of legal and property rights, a global societal need throughout recorded history. Taking this long view, the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights can be seen as the most recent of a series of rights within which archivist...

The renewal of Woodlands, Glasgow, between the 1970s and 2000s was characterised by historicist architecture, seemingly in line with the post-modernist spirit of the age. However, the programme of ...

When Frederic Jameson demanded that his readers “always historicize,” to be an historicist in the academy – it almost went without saying back then in 1981 – was to be a critical theorist invested ...

This paper examines discourses of liberal Islamophobia in Austria, analysing interviews with journalists from national newspapers, magazines and TV station. Using a theoretical framework that combi...

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) has been impactful in international law scholarship. However, many of its epistemic approaches, especially its active historicising, have often turned counterproductive to its objective of securing freedom for the peoples of the Third World. Moreover, pursuing the colonial past through weighty polemics has rendered TWAIL a discourse that engenders anti-Western sentiments. Further, TWAIL’s dialectic means of resistance and opposition to a past-influenced present ingrained in international law and systems, which are at the disposal of the West, have the reverse effect of dialectically imposing a Western otherness on TWAIL. Hence, an alternative manifesto is sketched, which, while it disagrees with the exclusion of the West in social production, refuses to privilege the West through a Hegelian dialectic of otherness. The alternative manifesto proposes an alternative dialectic wherein the otherness is a ‘universal’ in the self-consciousness of the su...

This paper analyzes the shifts in Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘critical philosophy of values’ as it developed hand in hand with his understanding of relativism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by analyzing the role that relativism played in his philosophical project, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Windelband's intellectual development in the context of historicism and Neo-Kantianism. On the other hand, by highlighting Windelband’s contribution to the understanding of relativism, it sheds light on an important episode in the history of that problem. The paper distinguishes between three phases in Windelband’s thinking and shows that his views about relativism changed in close connection with his conception of history. The early Windelband thought that historicism was compatible with absolute validity because he was firmly convinced of historical progress. The mature Windelband rejected progress as a means for justifying validity and put the problem of relativism into sharp r...