History and historicism -- The poetics of history -- The nature of historical explanation -- Historicism and historiography -- Enlightenment by natural law -- Critiques of enlightenment--Vico and Herder -- Kant and Hegel--towards hermeneutics -- Schleiermacher--the grammar and divination of history -- Dilthey's critique of historical reason -- Gadamer and the event of meaning -- Marx's poetry of the future -- Nietzsche's prelude to a philosophy of the future -- Freud, Lacan and the illusion of a future -- Foucault--from anti-historicist theory to new historicist practice -- Derrida's post cards -- New historicism -- Postcolonial stylistics and postmodern logic -- Herstory -- Globalization and the end of history.