This document provides an overview of New Historicism and Queer Theory literary theories. It discusses how New Historicism views literary texts as situated within the totality of institutions, practices, and discourses that constitute the culture of a particular time and place. It also acknowledges that both the text and the critic's interpretation are influenced by their unique historical contexts. For Queer Theory, it notes how the term "queer" was originally derogatory but has been reclaimed to identify non-heterosexual lifestyles and areas of study, and discusses how views have evolved from seeing fixed gay/lesbian identities to being more complex and acknowledging a spectrum of diverse experiences.

1. Literary Theory and
Criticism
Assignment
Name: Alisha Vaghasiya
M.A. Sem: 2
Paper No- 7: – literary
theory and criticism
Assignment topic:
Literary theory – New
Historicism and Queer theory

2. New Historicism
New historicism, since the early 1980s, has been the accepted name for a
mode of literary study that its proponents oppose to the formalism they attribute
both the New historicism and to the critical deconstruction that followed it.
In place of dealing with a text in isolation from its historical context, New
historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural condition of its production,
its meanings, its effects, and also of its later critical interpretation and evaluations.
This is not simply a return to an earlier kind of literary scholarship, for the
views and practices of the new historicists differ markedly from those of earlier
scholars who had adverted to social and intellectual history as a ‘background’ against
which to set a work of literature as an independent entity, or has viewed literature as
a ‘reflection’ of the worldview characteristic of a period.
Instead, a new historicism conceive of a literary text as a ‘situated’ within the
totality of institutions, social practices and discourses that constitute the culture of a
particular time and place, and with which the literary text interacts as both a product
and producer of cultural energies and codes.
What is New Historicism?
New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should
be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and
the history of the critic. Based on the literary criticism of Stephen Greenblatt and
influenced by the philosophy of Michel Foucault, New Historicism acknowledges not
only that a work of literature is influenced by its author's times and circumstances,
but that the critic's response to that work is also influenced by his environment,
beliefs, and prejudices.
A New Historicist looks at literature in a wider historical context, examining
both how the writer's times affected the work and how the work reflects the writer's
times, in turn recognizing that current cultural contexts color that critic's conclusions.
For example, when studying Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, one always comes to
the question of whether the play shows Shakespeare to be anti-Semitic. The New
Historicist recognizes that this isn't a simple yes-or-no answer that can be teased out
by studying the text. This work must be judged in the context in which it was written;
in turn, cultural history can be revealed by studying the work — especially, say New
Historicists, by studying the use and dispersion of power and the marginalization of
social classes within the work. Studying the history reveals more about the text;
studying the text reveals more about the history.
The New Historicist also acknowledges that his examination of literature is
"tainted" by his own culture and environment. The very fact that we ask whether
Shakespeare was anti-Semitic — a question that wouldn't have been considered
important a century ago — reveals how our study of Shakespeare is affected by our
civilization.
New Historicism, then, underscores the impermanence of literary criticism.
Current literary criticism is affected by and reveals the beliefs of our times in the
same way that literature reflects and is reflected by its own historical contexts. New

3. Historicism acknowledges and embraces the idea that, as times change, so will our
understanding of great literature.
What is most distinctive in this mode of historical study is mainly the result of
concept and practices of literary analysis and interpretation that have been
assimilated from various recent post structural theories. Especially prominent are:
(1)the views of the revisionist Marxist thinker Louis Althusser that ideology
manifests itself in different ways in the discourse of each of the semi-autonomous
institutions of an era, including literature and also that ideology operates covertly to
form an position the users of language as the ‘subject’ in discourse, in a way that in
fact, ‘subjects’ them is , subordinates them to the interests of the ruling classes.
(2) Michel Foucault’s view that the discourse of an era, instead of reflecting
pre-existing entities and orders, bring into being concept, oppositions, and
hierarchies of which it speaks; that these elements are both products and
propagators of ‘power’, or social forces, and that as a result , the particular discursive
formation of an era determine what is at the time accounted to be ‘knowledge’ and
‘truth’ as well as what is considered to be criminal, or insane or sexually deviant.
(3) the central concept in deconstructive criticism that all texts involves
modes of signification that was against each other, merged with MIKHAIL BAKHTIN’S
concept of the discourse nature of many literary texts, in the sense that they
incorporate a number of conflicting voices that represent diverse social classes and
interests.
(4) Developments in cultural anthropology, especially Clifford Geertz’s views
that a culture is constituted by distinctive sets of signifying systems, and hi use of
what he calls thick descriptions- the close analysis , or ‘reading’ of a particular
social production or event so as to recover the meaning it has for the people involved
in it, as well as to discover, within the overall cultural system, the network of
conventions, codes, and modes of thinking with which the particular item with those
meaning.
In an oft- quoted phrase , Louis Montrose described the new historicism as “ a
reciprocal concern with a history of the text and the textuality of history”. That is,
history is conceived to be not a set of fixed , objective facts but, the literature with
which it interacts, a text that interacts, a text that itself needs to be interpreted.
Any text, on the other hand, is conceive as a discourse which, although
it may seem to present, or reflect, an external reality, in fact consist of what are
called representations- that is –verbal formations which are the ‘ideological
products’ or ‘cultural constructs’ of the historical conditions specific to an era. A
number of historicists claim also that these cultural and ideological representations
in text serve mainly to reproduce, confirm and propagate. The complete power
structures of domination and subordination which characterize a given society.
Despite their common perspective on literary writings as mutually implicative
with all other components of a culture, we find considerable diversity and
disagreement among individual exponents of the new historicism.
The following proposals , however occur frequently in their writings,

4. sometimes in an extremes and sometimes in an a qualified form.
All of them are formulated in opposition to views that, according to new
historicists, were central historical construct in ideological construct in traditional
literary criticism.
Many Historicists assign the formative period of some basic construct to the
early era of capitalism in the 17th
and 18th
centuries.
1) Literature does not occupy a ‘trans- historical’ aesthetic realm which is
dependent on the economic, social, and political conditions specific to an era, nor in
literature subject to timeless criteria of artistic value.
Instead, a literary text is simply one of many kinds of texts- religious,
philosophical, legal., scientific and so on- all of which are formed and structured
by the particular conditions of a time and place, and among which the literary text
has neither unique status nor special privilege. A related fallacy of mainstream
criticism, according to New historicists, was to view literary text as autonomous body
of fixed meaning that text cohere to form an organic whole in which all conflicts are
artistically resolved.
On the contrary, it is claimed, many literary text consists of diversity of
dissonant voices, and these voices express not only the orthodox, but also the
subordinated and subversive forces of the era in which the text was produced.
Furthermore, what may seem to be artistic resolution of a literary plot, yielding
pleasure to the reader; is in fact deceptive, for it is an effect that serves to cover the
unresolved the conflicts of power, class, gender and diverse social groups that make
up the tensions that underline the surface meaning of a literary text.
2) History is not a homogeneous and stable pattern of facts and events
which serves as the ‘background’ to the literature of an era, or which literature can
be said simply to reflect, or which can be adverted to the material conditions that, in
a unilateral way determine the particularities of a literary text.
A new contrast to such views, a literary text is said by new historicists to be
thoroughly ‘embedded’ in its context, and in a constant interaction and interchange
with other components inside the network of institutions, beliefs, and cultural
power relationships, practices and products that, in their ensemble, constitute what
we call history.
New historicists commonly regard even the conceptual ‘boundaries’ by which
we currently discriminate between literature and non- literary text to be a construct
of post- Renaissance ideological formations.
New historicists acknowledge that they themselves, like all authors, are
‘subjectives’ that have been shaped and informed by the circumstances and
discourses specific to their era, hence that their own critical writing in great part
construct, rather than discover readymade textual meanings they describe and the
literary and cultural histories they narrate. To mitigate the risk that they all
unquestioningly appropriate text that were written in the past and present is not
coherent, but exhibits discontinuities; breaks and raptures , by doing so , they hope
to ‘distance’ and ‘estrange’ an earlier text and so sharpen their ability to detect its

5. differences from their present ideological assumptions.
Some historicists present their reading of text written in past as
‘negotiations’ between past and present. In this two-way relationship, the features
of a cultural product, which are identifiable only relative to their differences from the
historicist’s subject-position, in return make possible some degree of insight into the
forces and configurations of power- especially with respect to class, gender, race and
ethnicity- that prevail in the historicist’s present culture and serve to shape the
historicist’s own ideology and interpretations.
The concept, themes, and procedures of new historicist criticism took shape
into the late 1970s and early 1980s , most prominently in writings by scholars of
English Renaissance.
They directed their attention especially to literary forms such as the pastoral
and masque, and above all the drama; emphasized the role in shaping a texts as
discussive ‘sites’ which enacted and reproduced the interests and power of the
oppressed, the marginalized, and the dispossessed.
At almost the same time, students of the English Romantic Period developed
parallel conceptions of the intertextuality of literature and history, and similar views
the ‘representations’ in literary texts are not reflectors of reality but ‘concretized’
forms of ideology.
Historicists of Romantic literature, however, in distinction from most
Renaissance historicists, often name their critical procedures political reading of a
literary text- a reading in which they stress quasi-Freudian mechanism such as
‘suppression’, ‘displacement’ and ‘substitution’, by which they assert, a writer’s
political ideology inevitably disguises, or entirely elides into silence and ‘absence’, the
circumstances and contradictions of contemporary history. The primary aim of a
political order of a literary text is to undo these ideological disguises and
suppressions in order to uncover it’s subtext of historical and political conflicts and
operations which are the text’s true, although covert or unmentioned subject matter.
In the course of the 1980s, the characteristic viewpoints and practices of new
historicism spread rapidly to all periods of literary study, and were increasingly
represented, described and debated in conferences, books, and periodical essays.
New historicists also have parallel’s in the critics of other
ethnic literatures, who stressed the role of culture formations dominated by white
Europeans in suppressing, marginalizing or distorting the achievements of non white
and non European peoples. In the 1990s , various forms of new historicism, and
related types of criticism that stress the embeddedness of literature in historical
circumstances , replaced deconstruction as the reigning mode of avant-garde critical
theory and practice.
Stephen Greenblatt inaugurated the currency of the label ‘New
Historicism’. In his introduction to a special issue of Genre, vol. 15 (1982). He prefers,
however, to call his crucial enterprise ‘cultural poetics’, in order to highlight his
concern with literature the arts as integral with other social practices that, in their
complex interactions, make up the general culture of an era.

6. Greenblatt’s essay entitled “ Invisible Bullets” in Shakespearean Negotiations
(1988) serves to exemplify the interpretive procedures of the leading exponent of this
mode of criticism.
In this essay, Greenblatt, brings by reading a selections from Thomas
Harriot’s “ A Brief and time report of the New Found Land of Virginia”, written in
1588, as a representative Discourse of the English colonizers of America without its
author’s awareness, serves to confirm “ Machiavellian hypothesis of the origin of
princely power in force and fraud”. But nonetheless draws its audience irresistibly
towards celebration of that power.
Greenblatt then identifies parallel modes of power discourses and
counter discourse in the dialogues in Shakespeare’s Tempest between Prospero the
imperialist appropriates and caliban the expropriated native of his island, and goes
on to find similar discursive configurations in the texts of Shakespeare’s Henry plays.
In Greenblatt’s reading, the dialogues and events of the Henry plays reveal the degree
to which princely power is based on predation, calculation, deceit, and hypocrisy. At
the same time, the plays do not scruple to record dissonant and subversive voices of
Falstaff and various other representations of Elizabethan subcultures.
Those counter establishment discourses in Shakespeare’s plays ,
however , in fact are so managed as to maneuver their audience to accept and even
glorify the power structures to which the audience is itself subordinated.
Grenblatt applies to these plays a conceptual pattern, the subversion-
containment dialectic, which has been a central concern of new historicist critics of
Renaissance literature.
Queer Theory:-
Queer theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and
Lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about all modes of
variance- such as cross- dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality- from society’s
formative model of sexual identity, orientations and activities.
The term ‘queer’ was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and
female same – sex love as deviant and unnatural.
Since the early 1990s , however, it has been adopted by gays and lesbians
themselves as a noninvidious tern to identify a way of life and an area of scholarly
inquiry.
But lesbians and gay studies began as ‘liberation movements’ for African
American and feminist liberation during the anti –Vietnam war, anti- establishment,
and counter cultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s. since that time these
studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who strive to achieve, for
gays and lesbians, political, legal and economic right equal to those of the
heterosexual majority.
Through the 1970s , two movements were primarily separatist: gays often
thought of themselves as quintessentially male, which many lesbians, aligning
themselves with the feminist movement as sharing the anti- female attitudes of a

7. reigning patriarchal culture.
There has been growing recognition of the degree to which the two groups
share a history as a suppressed minority and possess political and social aims.
In the 1970s, researchers for the most part assumed that there was a fixed,
unitary identity as a gay or as a lesbian that has remain stable through human
history.
A major endeavor was to identify and reclaim the works of non
heterosexual writers from Plato to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wild, Marcel Proust, Andre
Gide, W.H.Auden and James Baldwin and from the Greek poet Sappo of Lesbos to
Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde.
The list included writers ( William Shakespeare and Christiana Rossetti are
also examples) who represented in their literary works homoerotic subject matter,
but whose own sexuality the available biographical evidence leaves uncertain.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however- in large part because of the assimilation of
the viewpoints and analytic method of Derrida, Foucault, and other poststructuralists-
the earlier assumptions about a unitary and stable gay or lesbian identity were
frequently put to question, and historical and critical analyses of sexual differences
became increasingly subtle and complex.
A number of queer theorist , for example adopted the deconstructive mode
of dismantling the key binary oppositions of Western culture, such as male/ female,
heterosexual/ homosexual, and natural/ unnatural, by which a spectrum of diverse
things id forced into only two categories, and in which the first category is assigned
privilege, power and centrality. While the second is derogated, subordinated and
marginalized. In an important essay of 1980, “ compulsive heterosexuality and lesbian
existence” Adrienne Rich posted what she called the “the lesbian continuum” as a
way of stressing how far ranging and the diverse is the spectrum of love and bonding
among women, including female friendship, the family relationship between mother
and daughter, and women’s partnership and social groups, as well as overtly physical
same sex relations.
Later theorists such as Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler undertook to invert the
standard hierarchical oppositions by which homosexuality is marginalized and made
unnatural, by stressing the extent to which the ostensible normativity of
heterosexuality is based on the suppression and denial of same sex desires and
relationships.
Queer reading has became the term for interpretive activities that undertake
to subvert and confound the established verbal and cultural oppositions and
boundaries between male/ female, homosexual/ heterosexual, and normal/
abnormal.
Another prominent theoretical procedure has been to undo the “essentialist”
assumption that heterosexual and homosexual are universal and trans- historical
types of human subjects, or identities, by historicizing these categories- that is by
proposing that they are cultural constructs that emerged under special ideological
conditions in a particular culture at a particular time.

8. A central text is the first volume of Michel Foucault’s ‘History of sexuality’
(1976), which claim that , while there had long been a social category of sodomy as a
transgressive human act, the homosexual as a special kind of human subject or
identity, was construction by the medical and legal discourse that developed in the
later part of the 19th
century.
In a further expansion of cultural constructionist theory Judith Butler , In
Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity” (1990), described the
categories of gender and of sexuality as performative, in the sense that the features
which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or
homosexual, the discourse also makes happen , by establishing an identity that the
second individual assimilates and the pattern of behavior that he or she proceeds to
enact. Homosexuality, by this view, is not a particular identity that effects a pattern of
action, but a socially pre-established pattern of action that produces effect of
originality in a particular identity. A fundamental constructionist text , frequently
cited in the arguments against essentialism, is “ One not born a woman” (1981) by
Monique Wittig, in The straight mind and other essays (1992).
A number of journals are now devoted to queer theory and to lesbian, gay
and transgender studies and criticism, the field has also became the subject of
regularly scheduled learned conferences, and has been established in the curriculum
of the humanities and social sciences in a great many colleges and universities.