The Literary Criticism Web

According to Stephen Greenblatt, the role of the New Historicist is to create a "more cultural or anthropological criticism" which will be "conscious of its own status as interpretation and intent upon understanding literature as part of a system of signs that constitutes a given culture." Literary criticism and cultural critique are integrated, with the critic's role being to investigate "both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text."

                    -- Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning

New Historicism began to coalesce in the 1980s as another critical return to focusing on the importance of historical context to understand literature. 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 of the poetics of culture. This exploration draws upon the insights of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theory. Some of the assumptions of the New Historicist also are reminiscent of the Marxist 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 vie 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. In the social exchange of goods, ideas, attitudes and even people, the cultural imperatives of constraint and mobility find expression. Through its forces of constraint, a society seeks to preserve itself, but through its forces of mobility a society moves to modify itself. Out of the conflicting discourses and countervailing forces of exchange within a culture, its direction and destiny emerges. (For more on these concepts see Stephen Greenblatt's discussion in "Culture.")

This New Historicist definition of the historical reality in which literature is embedded has led to some striking new strategies of critical interpretation. The New Historicist can have a refocused interest in the textual structures so vital to the Formalist because these reflect cultural forces of constraint and mobility. (See, for instance, Catherine Belsey's discussion of narrative structure in "History, Literature, and Politics.") But the New Historicist understanding of culture also deprives literature of its special artistic status accorded it by formalism. Literature is not autonomous but only one of a number of cultural "texts." In order to understand the meaning of literature in the context of the poetics of culture, the New Historicist must attend to extra-literary materials. The significance of the literary text resides in its intertextual relations with letters, diaries, advertising, films, paintings, comic books, fashions in clothing, medical treatises, developments in technology, etc.

This exploration of literature is challenging enough, but New Historicists often acknowledge one additional component to the poetics of culture comprising 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 the reader brings to the text influence and contribute to the episteme of its meaning.

The lists below summarize the main assumptions and common strategies of New Historicism.

Critical Assumptions

Critical Strategies

updated 07/30/99