What is New Historicism and Why It Is Very Important?

In the 1980s, Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt developed a similar critical approach to Marxism in their works. The New Historicist school of criticism shifted from text-centred schools of criticism, such as New Criticism, to a more contextualized view of literature that emphasizes the social, political, and historical milieu in which it was produced. The New Historicist view of literature is not that of a single mind but rather of a particular cultural moment. A New Historicist examines literature concerning other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate the impact of concepts, attitudes, and ideologies across a wider cultural spectrum, which is not exclusively literary in nature. Besides examining the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases derived from their historical position and ideologies. The meaning of a text is fluid rather than fixed, as one cannot escape the historical context in which it was created. New Historicists posit that artistic texts are products of historical contexts and means for understanding cultural and intellectual history.

Characteristics of New Historicism

1. It examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature.

2. Cultural poetics is a form of history of ideas popular in the 1950s.

3. The movement gained widespread influence in the 1990s, primarily due to the work of Stephen Greenblatt.

4. The term "new historicism" was coined by Greenblatt when he "collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done.

5. He wrote that the essays represented a 'new historicism'".

6. Greenblatt first used the term "New Historicism" in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance.

7. He uses Queen Elizabeth I's "bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare's Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the "mutual permeability of the literary and the historical".

8. The New Historicism movement is regarded by many as having influenced "every traditional period of English literary history".

9. Many scholars have noted that New Historicism is, in fact, "neither new nor historical."

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