“What is new about new historicism in particular is its recognition that history is the ‘history of the present’ (to borrow a phrase from the godfather of new historicism, Michel Foucault (see Foucault 1995, 29)), history is in the making rather than being monumental and closed, history is radically open to transformation and rewriting. Such work is motivated, as one commentator puts it, ‘not by a historical concern to understand the past’ so much as by ‘a critical concern to understand the present’ (Garland 2014, 373) and with how the present came to be as it is. New”