New Historicism
RENAISSANCE SELF-FASHIONING:
From More to Shakespeare
- Stephen Greenblatt
NEW HISTORICISM
• New Historicism is a critical approach developed in the 1980s in
the writings of Stephen Greenblatt it is characterized by a parallel
reading of the text with social-cultural and historical conditions,
which forms the context.
• New Historicists reject the fundamental tenets of New Criticism
(the text is an autotelic artefact), Liberal Humanism (the text has
timeless significance and universal value) and the Poststructuralist
practice of close reading.
• On the contrary, New Historicism as Louis Montrose in his work,
Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture
(1989) suggests, deals with the textuality of history and the
historicity of texts.
• Textuality of History: refers to the idea that history is constructed
and fictionalized.
• Foucault claims that old historians erase and even out all
inconsistencies, contradictions and discontinuities of actual history
and develop a coherent and consistent historical narrative,
complying with the dominant ideology of the state. There is no such
thing as objective history because history is a narrative like a
language, is produced in a context and is governed by the social,
economic and political interests of the dominant group/institutions.
• Historicity of Texts: refers to the “cultural specificity and social
embedment of all mode of writing,” the rootedness of a text in the
socio-historical, political and cultural ambience of its production.
• New Historicism is in a way poststructuralist in that it rejects the
essential idea of a common human nature that is shared by the
author, characters, and readers; instead it believes that identity is
plural and hybrid.
• New-Historicist interpretation of a text begins with
identifying the literary and non-literary texts available and
accessible to the public at the time of its production, followed
by reading and interpreting the text in the light of its co-text.
Such an interpretative analysis would ideally begin with a
powerful and dramatic explication of the Anecdote which is
the historical co-text. Thus, the text and co-text are perceived
as expressions of the same historical moment.
• Foucault’s archeological concept of history as archive informs
yet another tendency of what N-H believes in that they
consider history as fictionalized and as a co-text while
traditional historians consider history as facts and as the
background to the text, which is the foreground. Thus, N-H
applies the Poststructuralist idea that reality is constructed
and multiple and the Foucauldian idea of the role of power in
creating knowledge.
• N-H is parallel to Derrida’s notion that reality is textual and
Foucault’s idea of social structures as determined by dominant
discursive practices. Thus, New Historicists aim
simultaneously to understand the work through its historical
context and to understand cultural and intellectual history
through literature.
• In the book Metahistory, Hayden White suggests that all
historical facts come to us only in the form of narrative or
language, where the historian links the facts in a cause-effect
sequence. The hierarchy of the narrative not dependent on the
facts but on the historian’s interpretation and evaluation of the
facts.
• N-H seeks to bring our attention to the location of the historian
in construction of history.
• Similarly, N-H also argues that history is made up of conflicting
visions and attitudes rejecting all over-arching narratives of
history. N-H believes that every age has its Schism
(splits/divisions) and tensions and the task of the historian is to
locate these conflicting struggling versions of any society/age by
paying attention to subversive, anarchic and counter movements
and moments in every age, which the narratives of history
generally wipe out.
• N-H seeks to find examples of power and manifestation of
discursive practices, how they are dispersed within the text and
how they contribute to establishing the greatness or failure of a
text at a given point of time.
• The Discipline of N-H has been influenced by the Althusserian
concept of Ideology; (Ideology is omnipresent in all discourse
including literature and operates covertly to subjectify and
subordinate members of a society to the interests of the ruling
class. )
• The Derridean Deconstructionist idea that a text is at war with
itself; there is nothing outside the text and that reality is textualized.
• Bhaktinian Dialogism which posits that a text contains a
multiplicity of conflicting voices; and
• Foucauldian concept of Power/Knowledge and Discourse.
• Foucault expounds that Power (for instance; in the form of Panoptic
Surveillance State defines what is Truth, Knowledge & Normalcy.
Old Historicism New Historicism
Follows a hierarchical approach by creating a Criticism should incorporate diverse
historical framework and placing the literary discourses
texts within it.
Concerned with the world of the past Uphold Derridean view that ‘there is nothing
outside the text’, follows a parallel reading of
literature and history.
History is truthful document, absolute, Looks at history as represented and recorded
correct and universal. in literary texts. Culture as text.
Historical / Literary Text is absolute, supreme Deals with word of the past.
& complete in itself. ‘Contexts’ – ‘co-texts’ archives; Letters,
reports, notes, memos, photographs, etc.,
N-H work on reference documents from
within to understand the inherent fissures of
power/knowledge and discourse.
