New Historicism is a form of literary criticism which focuses both on understanding literary work through its historical context and on understanding historical events through literary analysis. New Historicism arose in the 1980s and gained wide acceptance during the 1990s. Major proponents of New Historicism include Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Liu, even though not all critics considered New Historicists agree with the label.
New Historicism arose as a response to schools of literary criticism such as the "New Critics" of the 1970s, who focused their critical approach entirely on the text of a literary work, disregarding its historical context. To these schools of criticism, a literary work had to be understood solely on its own merits, existing essentially independently from its intended audience and even from the intentions of its author. Against this view, New Historicists argued that works had to be understood within the cultural and social context of their production. In this respect, the school did not differ from previous eras of literary criticism, but returned to an earlier method of literary analysis.
New Historicism differed from previous approaches to literary criticism in several important ways, however. New Historicists consider literary works as products of their social and cultural circumstances, but they also consider history and culture as a product of literature and art, examining the ways in which these techniques shape identity historically. New Historicism also considers the historian or literary critic to be a product of specific historical circumstances. All criticism, therefore, is a product of its own time and reflects a contemporary understanding of history and literature, rather than an absolute meaning.
New Historicist approaches to literature, therefore, tend to focus on the relationship between a text and its context. For instance, New Historicist studies of Shakespeare tend to focus less on the role of Shakespeare's individual creativity and more on the overall structure of the theater and of society in Elizabethan England. New Historicism recognizes Shakespeare's work as containing multiple meanings, each influenced by and in turn influencing the social environment in which the plays were staged.
Key New Historicist texts include Stephen Greenblatt's 1980 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, the series of essays on Shakespeare by Louis Adrian Montrose and The New Historicism, a collection of essays edited by H. Aram Veeser and released in 1989. The journal Representations also publishes work from the New Historicist perspective. This school of thought has become widely accepted in academia.
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hamje32
Post 2 |
@MrMoody - I see what you’re saying, but I tend to think of the literary work as its own entity. Once the author releases that work, it takes on a life of its own.
Regardless of the historical context, you are limited in your understanding, because there may be layers upon layers of meaning in the text that even the author himself did not realize when he wrote it.
I believe that when you write, there are subconscious ideas that get embedded into the text. You may not know it yourself, but later on some other people will uncover these deeper layers of meaning.
I believe that this is the basis of psychoanalytical approaches to literary criticism and even some of the new feminist criticism as well, which points out the patriarchal symbolism in literature. |
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MrMoody
Post 1 |
I wish that New Historicism literary theory had gained widespread acceptance back when I went to college. When I studied literature, there was a lot of subjective analysis of the literary text.
The feeling seemed to be that you could never really know what the author intended; people were free to read their own meaning into the text. I found this approach to be quite frustrating, because I had the conviction that words meant something and that in fact it was possible to infer what the author was saying, if we understood the times in which he lived.
My position was not very popular, but it’s refreshing to discover that in fact a movement exists which advocates that context is important in literary interpretation. |
