New Historicism acknowledges that any criticism of a work is influenced by the critic's own background and beliefs. New Historicists examine both the text and their own perspectives. This approach considers elements outside the text, unlike New Criticism which focuses only on analyzing the text itself. New Historicism emerged in response to New Criticism's failure to account for the social and historical context that influenced literary works. It uses techniques from history and anthropology to provide thick descriptions of texts and elucidate them within their broader cultural context.

1. New Historicism-A Historical Analysis of
Literature
KAUSHAL DESAI
kaushaldesai123@gmail.com
Paper: MPEN-C-102: Literary Theories and Criticism:
Background and Contexts (Theory)
M.Phil. Sem. I
Roll No: 5
Submitted to: Swami Sahajanand College of
Commerce & Management, Bhavnagar.
http://desaikaushal1315.blogspot.com
http://www.slideshare.net/kaushal111

2. Introduction
• New Historicism acknowledges that any criticism of a work is necessarily
tinged with the critic’s beliefs, social structure, and so on. Most New
Historicists may begin a critical reading of a novel by explaining
themselves, their backgrounds, and their prejudices. Both the work and
the reader are corrupted by everything that has influenced them. New
Historicism thus represents a significant change from previous critical
theories like New Criticism, because its main focus is to look at things
outside of the work, instead of reading the text as a thing apart from the
author.

3. New Historicism-A Historical Analysis of Literature
• A Historicist movement Interested in history as represented
and recorded in written documents history as text.
“The word of the past replaces the world of the past.”
“The aim is not to represent the past as it really was, but to
present a new reality by re-situating it.”

4. New Historicism-A Historical Analysis of Literature
• In the wake of the revisionist historiography spawned by the
New Historicists in the United States a significant change has
occurred in the method of interpretation of literary texts.
• This change is evident in the way literary critics are
increasingly employing 'thick description' borrowed from
history and anthropology for elucidation of literary texts,
suggesting thereby the conflation of history and literature. In
a similar way, professional historians are using techniques of
literary interpretation in their study of society and culture.

5. • It can also say that, Literary studies in the 1980s challenged the literary
assumptions of "practical criticism" or New Criticism as practiced by F. R. Leavis,
I. A. Richards and others who located and interpreted the literary text within a
broader sphere of literary and moral traditions, invariably de-linking it from the
social, political and historical context that gave rise to it.'
• The impetus in literary studies to challenge new criticism came from different
directions, but mainly it came from a new intellectual ferment in the American
and European academia and hermeneutical procedures spearheaded by new
methodologies in analytical philosophy, linguistics, phenomenology, discourse
theory, speech-act theory, deconstruction and literary studies especially in
cultural poetics or new historicism, feminism, cultural materialism, post
colonialism and revisionist Marxism.
New Historicism-A Historical Analysis of Literature

6. • The autonomous aesthetic issues of literary studies were now
reinterpreted in the light of Foucauldian discourses,
hegemonic institutional practices and individual subjectivities.
The questioning of the grand Victorian canon and its
canonical texts by new historicists like Stephen Greenblatt,
Catherine Gallagher and Louis A. Montrose led literary theory
into an understanding that the production, categorization and
analysis of texts were determined by forces of history which in
turn shaped the cultural work itself.
New Historicism-A Historical Analysis of Literature

7. At last…
• Thus, New Historicism emerged as an inevitable reaction against the
failure of both new critical and deconstructive approaches to grapple
with the complex constitution of the literary text.
• Stephen Greenblatt is aware of this kind of criticism, and therefore, has
tried to obviate it by clearly formulating the centre-margin relationship
in the New Historicists thinking. According to him, the New Historicists
have 'been more interested in unresolved conflict and contradiction
than in integration; they are as concerned with margins as with the
centre; and they have turned from a celebration of achieved aesthetic
order to an exploration of the ideological and material bases for the
production of this order'.