New historicism is a literary criticism approach that analyzes a work of literature through its historical context and vice versa. It emerged in the 1980s as a response to the “New Critics” approach, focusing solely on the text. New historicists view works as products of their social and cultural circumstances, examining the ways in which literature and art shape identity. This approach recognizes multiple meanings in a text and their influence on society. Major texts include Renaissance Self-Fashioning and The New Historicism.
New historicism is a form of literary criticism that focuses on both understanding a work of literature through its historical context and understanding historical events through literary analysis. This school of criticism arose in the 1980s and gained widespread acceptance in the 1990s. Leading proponents include Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Liu, although not all critics considered New Historicists agree with the label.
This form arose as a response to schools of literary criticism such as the “New Critics” of the 1970s, which focused their critical approach entirely on the text of a literary work, regardless of its historical context. For those critics, a work of literature was meant to be understood solely on its own merits, existing essentially independently of its intended audience and even its author’s intentions. Against this view, the neo historicists argued that works should be understood in the cultural and social context of their production. In this sense, the school did not differ from previous eras of literary criticism, but returned to an earlier method of literary analysis.
However, the new historicism differed from earlier approaches to literary criticism in several important ways. The new critics view works of literature as products of their social and cultural circumstances, but also view history and culture as a product of literature and art, examining the ways in which these techniques historically shape identity. This school also regards the historian or literary critic as a product of specific historical circumstances. Each critique, therefore, is a product of its time and reflects a contemporary understanding of history and literature, rather than absolute meaning.
Approaches to literature in this school, therefore, tend to focus on the relationship between a text and its context. For example, studies of William Shakespeare tend to focus less on the role of Shakespeare’s individual creativity and more on the overall structure of theater and society in Elizabethan England. The approach recognizes Shakespeare’s work as containing multiple meanings, each affecting and in turn influencing the social environment in which the plays were staged.
Major New Historicist texts include Stephen Greenblatt’s 1980 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Louis Adrian Montrose’s series of essays on Shakespeare, and The New Historicism, a collection of essays edited by H. Aram Veeser and published in 1989. Representations magazine also publishes working from this perspective. This school of thought has been widely accepted in academia.
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