New Historical Criticism
New Historicism developed in the 1980s largely as a reaction to the text-only approach of
Formalism and the New Critics. While acknowledging the importance of the literary text itself,
the New Historicists also looks to historical context. Technically New Historicism is not “new”;
the majority of critics from 1920-1950 focused their analyses on the interplay between a text
and its historical context, but, with the popularity of Formalism and the advent of New
Criticism, historically-oriented critics faded into obscurity. However, the New Historical criticism
of the 1980s was not the same as that practiced earlier in the century. New Historicists believe
that criticism should incorporate diverse discourses, in particular poststructuralists, Marxists,
and feminists, along with cultural and reader-response critics. New Historicists believed a work
both influences and is influenced by historical reality.
The New Historicist understands literature to be rooted in its cultural and authorial connections.
In fact, the study of literary text is only one element of the New Historicist's exploration;
illuminating the social discourse or contest for power that is reflected in the intertextual
relations of literature as compared with other cultural texts is a major component of their
criticism. This exploration draws upon the insights of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theory.
Further, some of the assumptions of the New Historicist also are reminiscent of the Marxist and
feminist’s view of the dynamics of culture.
Like the Marxist critic, the New Historicist explores the place of literature in an on-going
contest for power within society but does not define this contest narrowly in terms of an
economic class struggle. Rather, within a culture, a chorus of disparate voices vies for attention
and influence. Literature provides one venue in which this web of conflicting discourses -- of
diverse interests, impulses, values, and attitudes -- can be heard. While the traditional socio-
historical critic seeks to articulate a single determinate social meaning in the text, the New
Historicist seeks to acknowledge the "episteme" of culture—the multiplicity of perspectives
that define the historical reality reflected in the text. This episteme of culture embodies cultural
codes used in the crucial social process of exchange. Specifically, New Historicism looks at the
social exchange of goods, ideas, attitudes and even people—what is termed the cultural
imperatives of constraint and mobility—that are expressed in a work. Through its forces of
constraint, a society seeks to preserve itself, but through its forces of mobility, a society moves
to foster change and growth in society.
This exploration of literature is challenging enough, but New Historicists often acknowledge
one additional component in their analysis of literary meaning: their own participation in the
cultural discourse of the text. Borrowing from the insights of Reader-Response theory, the New
Historicist recognizes that the predispositions and biases of the reader influences meaning.
The list below summarizes the main assumptions and common strategies of New Historicism:
1) All history is subjective. In interpreting historical facts or identifying historical contexts,
the commentator actually expresses his or her own beliefs, habits of thought, or biases.
2) The attempt of traditional historical criticism to identify a unified worldview of a society or
period is a reductive illusion. Culture is a web of conflicting discourses that cannot be
simplified into a single point-of-view or linear set of ideas.
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New Historical Criticism
3) Literature is only one of many historical discourses contributing to the definition of a
culture. As such, it dramatizes "culture in action." Critics look to other “texts” outside
literature to determine culture, such as diaries, news accounts, historical records, etc.
4) Thus, the historical commentator of literature does not reveal the objective meaning or
absolute truth of a text but only participates in an historical discourse that often reveals
as much about the commentator as about the text.
Critical Strategies
1) In order to assess the significance of a literary text, the critic begins by describing the
complex web of attitudes, values, ideals, and points-of-view in the literary text that
comprise its “episteme” of culture.
2) The critic considers how the circumstances of the writer's life may influence the
discourses contained within the text.
3) The critic highlights the social rules, codes, or mores articulated within the text.
4) The critic must also acknowledge his own predispositions and cultural biases while
exploring how the multiple voices within a text are balanced, reconciled or subverted.
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