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[verysneaky]

To confirm the previous poster's point:

a) English departments vary enormously with respect to their emphasis on high theory: it's mandatory in some and unwelcome in others.

b) New Historicism is quite a force in lit crit these days, for better or worse (I'm more or less a fan, but many others are not): ironically, if you were back in an English program, your odds of being happy now would probably be much better than they were.

It sounds to me as if you may have ended up in a program, not just a discipline, that was a poor fit for you.

I mention these things, not because I think you should return to English, but because if you return to academia you may want to form a different impression about what your colleagues in the English department are doing. Their research may or may not look like what you did in your program however long ago.

[onion]

I thought I'd jump in with some advice about the statement of purpose (with which some may disagree).  You should be able to gesture toward what interests you, and which faculty members you are interested in working with.  I've served as the grad student rep on the graduate admissions committee at my grad program and on the graduate admissions committee at my former university, and those were the statements of purpose that were taken seriously.  Often, after a meeting, someone might wander down the hall and say, "Hey, Bob, we had an interesting application from someone who wants to work with you.  She wants to study the way US jurists meddled in Tanzania in the 19th century."  And Bob just might bite, and you'd be admitted as Bob's student.  The statements that began with "As Herodotus tells us..." or "Ever since I was a little boy growing up near the Kahokia mounds, I knew I wanted to be a historian" pretty quickly got tossed to the side.

Just my two cents, based on my experience.
Good luck!

[msparticularity]

On the issue of critical theory, SecretWeapon and I both interviewed with a department last year (for different positions) that was firmly postcolonial in outlook. What was kind of funny was that after AHA, a bunch of people on the wiki were outraged that during their conference interviews they had been asked about how they would incorporate postcolonial perspectives into their teaching areas (which concerned earlier eras). Both SW and I had been able to tell just by glancing at the department members' web pages that this was a department grounded in critical theory, but apparently a bunch of people had neglected to look or think about that possibility.

So, yeah--some departments are really pretty exclusively critically grounded, some are mixed according to specialty area, and others are (from my perspective) still mired in a colonial, modernist world view :).

[catilina]

My issues with "critical theory" are really just part of the same problem--English was not the right field for me.  I didn't really believe in a lot of the work I was doing, or believe it was worthwhile.  I used to wish I could summon the enthusiasm for it that other people seemed to have.    (And I do think it is important--just not the right thing for me.)

I was completely clueless about this before starting the program right out of undergrad.  I liked to read literature, so of course going to graduate school in English would make sense, right?  I wish I had known. 

I have been looking closely at lists of recent dissertations in history, and I feel very good about what I see there.  Most of them are the kinds of things I'd want to read or write about--things I could see myself getting very interested in.  I understand immediately what they are about.  (Not true in English--even after three years of graduate study I still sometimes had no idea what people meant when they would tell me what they were working on.  I probably shouldn't admit that!) 

I'm taking the recent dissertation lists as a good indication of the kind of work I'd be doing in a history department, and it looks like a much better fit.