Explain NEW HISTORICISM

New Historicism is a theory applied to literature that suggests literature must be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and history of the critic. This started in 1980s taking over the then known and widely appreciated phenomena of New Criticism. It developed its roots; with its advancement has greatly influenced the way in which literature is looked at and became a prominent study tool in 1990s.

Unlike previous historical criticism, which limited it to simply demonstrating how a work was reflective of its time, New Historicism evaluates how the work is influenced by the time in which it was produced. It also examines the social sphere in which the author moved the psychological background of the author, the books and theories that may have influenced the author and other factors which influence the work of art. All work is biased.

The term New Historicism was coined by Stephen Greenblatt, a critic and English professor at the University of California. He coined the word when he put together a bunch of essays and was desperate to bring out the introduction. Stephen said that the essays presented phenomena which he referred to as the ‘new historicism’. His work Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare is a very good example. In this he analysis the ways in which writers like Thomas More, William Tyndale, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spencer and Christopher Marlow fashioned their self identities through a network of social, psychological, political and intellectual discourses.

Discussing Shakespeare Greenblatt says, his plays were being centrally and repeatedly concerned with the production and containment of subversion and disorder. Jonathan Goldberg discussing Measure for Measure says, Shakespeare’s contribution was that the language of literature and of royal power is a shared language. Another critic Louis Montrose in his essay Shaping Fantasies notes that Elizabeth was precariously placed as a women at the head of a strongly patriarchal society and her power involved a series of contradictions and complications.

H.Aram Veeser introducing an anthology of essays The New Historicism noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicist discourse. They are as follows:-

 1)  That expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices.

2) Every act of unmasking critique and opposition uses, the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes.

3) Literary and non-literary texts circulate separately.

4) That no discourse imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, also cannot express inalterable human nature.

5) A critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.

However, New Historicism underscores the impermanence of literary criticism. The latter is affected by and reveals the beliefs of our times in the same way that literature reflects and is reflected by its own historical contexts. New Historicism acknowledges and embraces the idea that as times change so will our understanding of great literature. This is concerned with historicity of texts and the textuality of history within some form of archival continuum.

Despite the numerous attacks by traditional scholars, feminists and even cultural materialists, New Historicism still developed and made a prominent place in literature.