Historical approaches

pp. 169-183

in: Anna Snaith, Palgrave advances in Virginia Woolf studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

The appreciation of Woolf s historical context is inseparable from the renewed interest generally in historical approaches to literary studies, after a period in which critical methodologies from Practical Criticism in the late 1920s and 1930s, to New Criticism in America in the 1940s, to the stress on post- structuralism in the 1970s and 1980s tended to advocate studying texts in isolation. Of course, it would be too much of a simplification to suggest that historicism in literary studies ever really disappeared. But, what is important about this new found interest in historical context is the effect that it has had upon our thinking about history and historiography.