SOURCE: “The Kingdoms of Theory and the New Historicism in America,” in Yale Review, Vol. 77, No. 2, March, 1988, pp. 207–36.

In the following excerpt, Gunn discusses trends in contemporary historical theory and issues raised by White in The Content of the Form.

Theory has become ubiquitous in literary and cultural studies, and it is sometimes difficult not to feel under siege. The study of verbal texts, like the study of cultural forms of almost any kind, has in many ways become a beleaguered enterprise in which the establishment of methodological and theoretical credentials now often takes precedence over all other intellectual procedures. “The aim of interpretation,” as E. D. Hirsch once termed it, is more often than not to validate the system of thought that presumably serves as its premises. No longer are texts, for example, or things that can be “read” as “texts,” always studied as intentional forms whose...