New Historicism

This school of criticism aims at reuniting a work with the historical age in which it was produced. It tries to interpret a work by identifying it with the political and cultural movements of the age to which it belongs. The central concern of the New Historicist is that every work is a product of the historic moment in which it was created.

The approaches of New Historicism is quite different from the notion of traditional Historicism. Traditional Historicism is a method of representing the history in linear manner. The series of events are based on the principle of cause and effect. The New Historicism, on the other hand is more concerned with how a particular event in history has been interpreted, and examines how the interpretation reflects the socio-political leanings of the interpreter. According to the New historicists, history can never be objective, as it depends on the person who is recording an event. A New Historicist therefore studies a text against the background of the historical age. It is the method of interpretation based on the parallel reading of literary as well as non literary texts based on the same historical period.

In Renaissance Self-fashioning: from more to Shakespeare (1980), Stephen Greenblatt introduces the term new historicism to refer to a reading practice, which takes the historical, cultural contexts of a text in connection with the production of its meaning. Such a reading strategy is evolved as a reaction against the close readings of New Criticism and Deconstruction, which completely rejected the historicity of the text.

Louis Montrose defines New Historicism as “a reciprocal concern with the historicity of the texts and the textuality of history”, emphasising the role of literature as a historically situated object and history as a linguistic construct. In fact, both are representation or discourses and neither one is closer to the ‘truth’.