How It All Got Started
Back in the 1970s in California, a group of young academics from all kinds of different disciplines—among them literary critics, art historians, historians, and anthropologists—met randomly in a pizza parlor and realized they all liked pineapple with anchovies.
When they were full, they sat around and chatted and came up with all kinds of theories about the relationship between history and literature, art and history, anthropology and literature. They wanted to knock down all those big walls that separated different disciplines from one another (isn’t anthropology kind of relevant to reading literature? And doesn’t literature maybe explain some stuff about history? Um, yes.)
As a result of these discussions, they decided to start a new journal called Representations, which would focus on the links and relationships between these different disciplines. Many of the early New Historicist scholars published in this journal.
And from there, a new way of historicizing was born.