Greenblatt and company treated “culture as text”; they challenged such concepts as originality, genius, aesthetic merit, “the classics,” the canon, and “major works” vs. “minor works”; and even as they sought to upend conventional approaches to literary criticism, they sought, too, to overturn what they saw as old-fashioned approaches to the telling of history, producing “counterhistories” that would amount to “assaults on the grands récits inherited from the last century.”