New Historicism - Definition and Overview

New Historicism as an approach to literary criticism and theory arose in the 1990s. Scholars of Renaissance literature particularly associate it with the work of Stephen Greenblatt; another group of New Historicist critics write about Romanticism.

New Historicist scholars begin their analysis of literary texts by attempting to look at what other texts -- both literary and non-literary -- a public could access at the time of writing, and what the author of the original text might have read. They also, however, attempt to relate texts to the political and socio-economic cirumstances in which they originated. For example, a well-known New Historicist reading examines the travellers' tales and geographical works available to William Shakespeare about the discovery of the 'new world' (i.e. North America), and relates them to his play The Tempest. Therefore, this reading argues, we should interpret Shakespeare's play less as a 'timeless' literary creation and more as a product of the context in which it appeared (see contextualism, thick description), and should see it as contributing to contemporary debates about colonialism.

Clearly, in its historicism and in its political interpretations, New Historicism owes something to Marxism. But whereas Marxism (at least in its cruder forms) tended to see literature as part of a 'superstructure' in which the economic 'base' (i.e. material relations of production) manifested itself, New Historicist thinkers tend to take a more nuanced view of power, seeing it not exclusively as class-related but extending throughout society. This view derives primarily from Michel Foucault. In its tendency to see society as consisting of texts relating to other texts, with no 'fixed' literary value above and beyond the way specific societies read them in specific situations, New Historicism also owes something to post-modernism. However, New Historicists tend to exhibit less skepticism than post-modernists, and show more willingness to perform the 'traditional' tasks of literary criticism: i.e. explaining the text in its context, and trying to show what it 'meant' to its first readers. In the example of The Tempest above, New Historicist writers sometimes touch on themes also dealt with by critics in the school of Edward Said.

External link

• New Historicism (http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/new_historicism.html) from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism