2. Name: Drashti P. Nagla
Roll No. : 9
Paper no : 8 Cultural Studies
Presentation topic: New Historicism
Enrolment no: 2069108420170021
M.A English semester – 2
Beach year : 2016-18
Submitted to –
Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University
3. New Historicism Definition:
• A Method of Literary Criticism that
emphasizes the historicity of a text by relating
it to the configuration of power, Society, or
ideology in a given time.
4. New Historicism:
• Developed in 1980s.
• Stephen Greenblatt.
• Basic idea: History
with literary text.
• Parallel reading of
literary text and
history.
5. Stephen Greenblatt:
Stephen Greenblatt first
developed in his work in
1980.
Afterwords it goes on
spreading during the same
decade.
He wrote in his book “ will
of the world”,
context is replaced by “co-
text”, that is an interrelated
non – literary text from the
same time period.
6. What is New Historicism?
• “ A method based on the parallel reading of literary
and non-literary texts, usually of the same time
period.”
• New Criticism is a school of literary theory which
combines critical theory into easier forms of practice
for academic literary theorists of the 1990s.
• New Historicists ask, ‘ how has the event been
interpreted?’ and ‘ what do the interpretations?’ so
new Historicism resists the notion that, History is a
serious of events that have a linear and causal
relationship: event A caused event B, event B caused
event C and so on.
• New Historicist are Stephen Greenblatt, J.W. Lever.
7. Advantages of New Historicism:
Written in a far more accessible way than
post- structuralist theory.
It presents its data and draws its conclusion in
a less dense way.
Material is often fascinating and distinctive.
New Territory( subject).
Political edge is always sharp, avoids
problems of straight Marxist Criticism.
8. Disadvantage of New Historicism
• The term itself is distinctive in it’s meaning
• A different way to observe history
• Or in a way, recreating history with different
perception
– The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is a different take on
Biblical myth of Christ
– In the painting by Leonardo Da Vinci Christ is having
last supper with his disciples, and there’s a lady near
by Jesus and Dan Brown has taken up that idea and
presented another myth on the basis of the biblical
myth.
9. Difference between old & New
Historicism:
Old Historicism
• Hierarchial
• A Historical movement:
creates a historical
framework in which to place
the text.
• “ the word of the past
replaces the world of the
past.”
New Historicism
• Parallel Reading
• A Historicist movement:
interested in history
represented and recorded
in written documents-
history as text.
• The aim is not to represent
the past as it really was, but
to present a new reality by
re- situating it.
