Literature
New Historicism
New Historicism is a literary theory that emphasizes the historical and cultural context in which a literary work was produced. It seeks to understand the text by examining the social, political, and economic forces at play during the time of its creation. New Historicism rejects the idea of literature as a timeless, universal expression, instead focusing on the interconnectedness of literature and history.
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12 Key excerpts on "New Historicism"
- Ann Baynes Coiro, Thomas Fulton(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Such criticism has had lasting effects since many literary critics hoped to collaborate with historians. Indeed, implicit and often explicit in the historicist movement was a demand that literary studies become more historically responsible. Old, New, Now 7 Yet for many historians, historicism was simply irresponsible history. In an especially perceptive essay, Gabrielle Spiegel wrote in 1990 that “the achievement of cultural history lies in its reintroduction of a historicist consideration of literature; its failure lies in its refusal to differentiate between text and context or to establish an intelligible relation between them that does not lead to their mutual implication in a textually con- ceived universe.” 27 Inverting Montrose’s formulation, Spiegel went on to assert, “if we want to contextualize texts, we cannot achieve this by merely textualizing the context.” 28 One problem never properly faced in New Historicist criticism is that the same level of speculation allowable in the interpretation of literary meaning cannot hold in the interpretation of events and facts. Still, as Marjorie Garber points out, interpretation of facts was not what New Historicism had originally set out to do. Instead, New Historicism stressed the idea that “history, or histories, could not be understood as determinative or lineal causes but rather as complex net- works of cultural effects.” Paradoxically, she continues, “New Historicism began by reading history as a text, but it created, despite its best efforts, a desire for history as a ground.” 29 Historicism has largely and somewhat unconsciously moved in the last century from an enterprise that used his- tory to interpret the text to an enterprise that uses the text as a means to explain history. It is important to acknowledge the ways in which New Historicism wrought significant changes in the discipline of history itself.
eBook - PDFLocal Transcendence
Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
- Alan Liu(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
77 Instead of the influence that had orga-nized the cross-flow between context and text, in short, now there is only a metaphoric transference pointed out (again, we may see the back-and-forth shuttling of the scholar’s pointer) through a deft manipulation that might well seem to older historians of ideas a wave of the wizard’s wand. The overall result is that the New Historicism is at once more frank than the New Criticism—because it makes no bones about wishing to establish a subversive intersubjectivity and interaction between texts and their contexts— and excruciatingly more embarrassed (etymologically, “barred, obstructed”). While driven to refer literature to history (most lit-erally in its notes referring to historical documents), it is self-barred from any method able to ground, or even to think , reference more secure than trope. Indeed, the very concept of reference becomes taboo. Ignoring the fact that historical evidence by and large is referred to in its notes (which The Power of Formalism / 57 / has the effect of lending documentary material an a priori status denied the literary works and anecdotes it reads and rereads), the New Histori-cism proceeds tropologically as if literary texts and historical contexts had equal priority. Literary “authors” thus claim an equivalence with political “authority,” and “subjected” intellects with their monarchical “subject,” through an argument of paradox, ambiguity, irony, or (to recur to dia-lectic) lordship/bondage not far removed at base from the etymological wordplay of deconstruction. As deconstructive catachresis is to reference, then, so subversion is to power—but without the considered defense of tropology allowing deconstruction to found alogical figuration in the very substrate of its version of historical context: the intertext. New Historicist contextuality is an intertextuality of culture without a functional philos-ophy or antiphilosophy.
eBook - PDFLiterature Now
Key Terms and Methods for Literary History
- Michel Delville, Sascha Bru, Bruyn Ben De Bruyn, Sascha Bru, Ben De Bruyn, Michel Delville(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
Even scholars of literature now, apparently, cannot avoid thinking in historical terms. Today, we are all literary historians. This book, far from aiming to be exhaustive, intends to mark this exciting and seemingly ubiquitous turn to history in literary studies and to guide scholars and students in coming to terms with that turn. The book explores how literary history and its terminological and conceptual structures are affected by these many new theories and contexts, and it seeks to highlight how our very understanding of litera-ture, like literature itself, is now in the process of fundamentally changing. After deconstruction, New Historicism and the newer approaches of the last two decades, even such core terms as ‘history’ and ‘context’ can no longer be taken for granted. In a way, we could say that Fredric Jameson’s famous call, expressed in 2 Sascha Bru, Ben De Bruyn, Michel Delville The Political Unconscious (1981), to ‘always historicize’ literature and the methods and concepts we use in understanding literary texts is itself in the process of being reinterpreted, re-examined in the light of its own historicity. In the 1980s and 1990s, literary critics interpreted his injunction to mean rubbing texts up against their most immediate ‘contexts’ – understood in ideological, social, or cultural terms.
eBook - PDF- Tim Milnes(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Nigel Wood’s distinction between these two sects is useful here: ◾ The ‘old’ historicism can be defined in several ways, but, in outline, it involves certain working principles: a belief that the investigator can be empirically neutral if she/he is scrupulous about source materials by quot-ing contemporary or primary authorities for historiographical conclusions. This presupposes the removal of the self from one’s investigations so that the evidence may have a chance of ‘speaking for itself’, and ensures the even-handedness of one’s approach, yet it is also regarded as a historian’s duty to trace a coherent account (with agents and reagents) of what hap-pened, to instil causes and effects that supply a global explanation of why and how. Overall, historicism deals in structure and direction. What New Historicists point out is that this is narration and that History is inextricably bound up with textual effects: it is written . 1 ◽ Another way of thinking about the difference between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ historicisms is in terms of a disagreement about ‘context’. Traditionally, literary historians attempted to interpret texts by placing them in their historical (biographical, philosophical, political) context. What many New Historicists reject, however, is the notion of con -text as a kind of background or frame that is external to the text itself. They argue that dropping the dichotomy between the literary and the non-literary means that no clear dividing line can be drawn between text and context: instead, they maintain, discourse permeates everything. Texts are historical and history is textual. This interweaving of text and context means that commentators have no stable grounds upon which to con-duct an ‘objective’ framing of the text they are interpreting. As the prod-ucts of language and history no less than Wordsworth, modern critics must relate their own historical situatedness to that of the poem.
eBook - PDF- Paul H. Fry(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
What probably accounts for the remarkable popularity and influence of the New Historicism in the period roughly from the late 1970s through the early 1990s was the increasingly politicized sensibility of academic thought. The New Historicism was a response to pressures from without and to related pressures from within. History was increasingly “what hurt,” in Jameson’s expression, and in that atmosphere within the academy there was an increasing and loudly proclaimed sense of ethical failure in the isolation of literary texts from historical currents by literary study as it was allegedly practiced in certain forms. Beginning with the New Criticism through the period of deconstruction and the recondite discourse of Lacan and others in psychoanalysis, there was a feeling widespread among younger scholars in particular, in view of pressing social concerns—post-Vietnam, sensitive iden-tity concerns, concerns about the distribution of power and global capital—a feeling amounting to what one can only call a guilt complex in academic 248 The Social Context literary scholarship that a change of direction was required; and that wave of guilt resulted in the “return to history.” It was felt that an ethi-cal tipping point had been arrived at and that the modes of analysis that had been flourishing needed to be superseded by those in which history and the political implications of what one was doing became prominent and central. I have to say that in debates of this kind there’s always a lot of hot air, perhaps on both sides. In many ways, as I’ve tried to indicate from time to time, it’s just not the case that the so-called isolated approaches really were isolated. Deconstruction in its second generation wrote perpetually about ethics and history and tried to orient its techniques to possible ways of approaching history, just to give one example.
eBook - PDF- Neema Parvini(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- The Arden Shakespeare(Publisher)
3 A will to look beyond the isolated text at the multiple contexts – even unlikely ones – that inform the production of any work of literature. THE LEGACY OF New Historicism 147 4 A shift in focus from language and form, or characters and their motivations, to representations of power, politics and history. 5 A shift in perception about Shakespeare’s works (and literary works in general), from the belief that they are timeless and universal to the belief that they are wholly historically contingent. 6 Correspondingly, a de-privileging of literature as a ‘special’ category of text. Literary works are cultural artefacts, no different from maps, pamphlets, instruction manuals, items of clothing, or any number of everyday objects. British cultural materialists and the materialist feminists would also build on new historicist work to add a seventh: 7 A renewed focus on identity politics, and a radical questioning of the Dead-White-Male patriarchy. Even if New Historicism itself is no longer being practised, these seven broad categories, in some shape or form, have endured to the present day. It is why graduates of the past decade can still realistically call themselves ‘children of New Historicism’. It is also why, no matter which way the critical pendulum swings in the coming years, New Historicism has left an indelible mark on Shakespeare studies that shook it to its foundations. Even if the new materialists did not intend their version of Shakespeare studies ‘after Theory’ to lapse into a common-sense positivist historicism, to some extent this is what has transpired. Though there have been exceptional ‘new materi-alist’ studies produced in the past fifteen years, the same time frame has seen an excess of work that has been leaden and formulaic, almost rote, in its complacent adherence to the prevailing orthodoxies.
Available until 27 Jan |Learn more- Christopher Prendergast(Author)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
4 Circulating Representations New Historicism AND THE POETICS OF CULTURE New Historicism, like all the other isms of our time, has rapidly become a catchword, a label, under which the heterogeneous is repackaged and marketed as the more or less homogeneous. The intellectual reality of New Historicisms in fact discloses a variety of sins or virtues or a mix of both depending on one’s point of view (the points of view themselves of course vary in that from its inception to the present New Historicism has been an object of fierce and continuing controversy). For example, in the very fine book by Graham Bradshaw on Shakespeare, 1 we find, convincingly demonstrated, fundamental differences, at least in the case of Shakespearean interpretation, between American New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Stephen Greenblatt) and British New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield). Bradshaw, quite rightly in my view, sustains a respectful dialogue with Greenblatt (whose work he simultaneously admires and disagrees with), while reserving for the British scholars a disdain verging on contempt for their willful dogmatism, polemical straw men, and, above all and paradoxically, their radical inability to think in a genuinely historical way at the very moment they speak in the name of History, for instance, by ripping speeches out of dramatic context as if they were embodiments of Shakespeare’s own views and thus perpetrating the gravest error of all: namely, systematic disregard of the elementary point that any historicizing of Shakespeare must attend to the generic and structural realities of what Bradshaw calls “dramatic thinking.” Dramatic thinking is a particular modality of thought (just as poetic and philosophical thinking are), a perspectival mode in which a dramatic speech is relativized not simply to a point of view (that of the speaking character) but also to its place in the temporal unfolding of the play
eBook - PDF- A. Snaith(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
8 historical approaches linden peach The appreciation of Woolf’s historical context is inseparable from the renewed interest generally in historical approaches to literary studies, after a period in which critical methodologies from Practical Criticism in the late 1920s and 1930s, to New Criticism in America in the 1940s, to the stress on post- structuralism in the 1970s and 1980s tended to advocate studying texts in isolation. Of course, it would be too much of a simplification to suggest that historicism in literary studies ever really disappeared. But, what is important about this new found interest in historical context is the effect that it has had upon our thinking about history and historiography. While New Historicism, concerned with rethinking the concepts of history and historiography in the 1980s, was in part a reaction against ahistorical criticism, it also developed from philosophical thinking about the nature of language, especially structuralist approaches, broadly speaking concerned with how language organizes our thinking and perception of the world, and what is called deconstruction, which highlights the contradictory and ambivalent nature of language. Inevitably, a greater awareness of how the language available to us determines our thinking and world views and is itself contradictory led to more rigorous questioning of the nature of history and the reliability of historical narrative. This rethinking of history is informed by a general scepticism as to whether we can conceive of history as anything other than a particular narrative, based on selection and occlusion, representing particular viewpoints and interests. Aware of the subjective and relative nature of historical narrative, it became difficult in the 1980s to think of ‘history’ as other than ‘histories’.
eBook - PDFTemporal Circumstances
Form and History in the Canterbury Tales
- L. Patterson(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
No doubt there will eventually be another turn of the critical wheel of Fortune. However, historicism-whether of the idealist mode promoted by Robertson or of the largely materialist mode currendy on offer-is not likely ever to disappear entirely from medieval literary studies. I The return to history in literary studies is widely understood as a reaction against the privileging of the autonomous text that, first as New Criticism and then as deconstruction, dominated literary studies from the postwar period through the 1980s. Yet reading historicism as simply reactive--as the triumphant return of a rejected past-simplifies critical history in a way that obscures its lessons. The textual formalism that has been displaced should not be seen as simply negative, for it generated both the need and the possibility of a newly defined historicism and not through the excesses of which its opponents accused it but by the internal dynamic of its own logic. The development of a critical historicism can be described in terms of two phases, although such a distinction is more analytical than chrono- logical, and a narrative of the process can indicate the differences that the detour through textuality has made. The first phase began in the 1960s and 1970s with the deconstructive revision of the New Criticism of the postwar period. The privileged category of New Criticism was that of the literary, whether as instantiated in canonical texts that were the objects of New Critical interpretive attention or as a general literariness that was the subject of New Critical theorizing.
eBook - ePubW.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics
Literature as Historiography
- Lynn L. Wolff(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Chapter 1Literature as Historiography in Context
The first part of this chapter traces the sustained contact between historiography and literature from Aristotle’s differentiation of two distinct discourses to the discursive fusion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictional forms. Since this is both a long and well-documented relationship, I aim to highlight select moments in order to focus on a new literary form that emerges from the close connection between history and literature. I explore the tension inherent in the simultaneous in- and co-dependence of these two discourses, arguing that their sustained contact is rooted in the fact that neither history nor fiction is a stable concept. Furthermore, the discursive difference – whether reinforced in narrative historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or destabilized by the “linguistic turn” of structuralism and postmodernism – remains an organizing principle for both literature and historiography across the ages. Despite and precisely because of the instability of both history and fiction, made most acute in theories of postmodernism, truth and authenticity persist as core values to both.109 The parallels between and overlapping of literature and history will be discussed here, that is, the literary dimension of historiography and the historicity of literature.110The second part of this chapter takes a closer look at the way in which Sebald’s literary texts bring history and literature into dialogue with one another and the ethical dimensions of such a practice. The authenticity or feeling of authenticity in Sebald’s texts, that is, an authenticity based on emotional connection rather than rational reflection or factual reference,111 suggests that literature not only possesses a truth value in itself but can also be a means of accessing and transmitting historical truth. In considering the relationship between historiography and literary discourse from a diachronic perspective, this chapter responds to the question of the sustainability of traditional concepts and the emergence of new ones. Furthermore, I articulate this book’s central claim that Sebald’s œuvre forges a new discourse of literary historiography, a new type of historiography that comes into being only in the literary mode and that reveals literature’s privileged position for exploring, preserving, and understanding the past.112
- Neema Parvini(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
3 New Historicism 11 New Historicism and cultural materialism are thus said to supplant liberal-humanist scholarship with its outmoded, diachronic conception of ‘a unitary past’, 4 and its view of history as a grand narrative of human progress, putting in its place ‘the idea of an epistemological rupture’ so prevalent in Althusserian and Foucauldian notions of a discontinuous history. 5 Cultural historicism is said to replace the close reading required by the humanist’s formalism – which rests on assumptions of unity and ideological pretensions to scholarly objectivity – with the ‘methodologi-cal anarchy’ celebrated by H. Aram Veeser. 6 However, a brief engagement with other views of the cultural his-toricist project tells a rather different story. In a seminal essay, Walter Cohen found that New Historicism was not as radically opposed to for-malism as it appeared to be: The strategy is governed methodologically by the assumption that any one aspect of a society is related to any other. No organising principle determines these relationships: any social practice has at least a potential connection to any theatrical practice. Hence new historicist studies of Shakespeare have a radically unpredictable quality. This implicit commitment to arbitrary con-nectedness produces impressive results . . . yet [this] commitment . . . inevita-bly limits the persuasiveness of much new historicist work . . . Contradictions between essays arise as a matter of course. 7 Cohen recognises the assumption in cultural historicism that any two parts of a culture will necessarily have significance for each other on the grounds that they are the products of this same culture. Thus they will share certain ideological or discursive features, and might both be said to reproduce or to resist power.
eBook - ePubWho Killed Shakespeare
What's Happened to English Since the Radical Sixties
- Patrick Brantlinger(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Even that whipping boy of the new historicist Shakespeareans, E. M. W. Tillyard, sought in The Elizabethan World Picture to illuminate literary texts by showing their relationships to nonliterary texts. The New Critics, moreover, operated sometimes as historians and never claimed that literary texts couldn’t or shouldn’t be contextualized in relation to the nonliterary texts among which they “circulated” (what they did claim was that the “extrinsic” and nonliterary should not be mistaken for the “intrinsic” in the interpretation of a literary text). Perhaps the only novelty in Veeser’s third point is the suggestion that the New Historicism does not privilege the literary over the nonliterary, which is not the same as saying, with Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory, that the literary is nonexistent or that there are only different forms of rhetoric or ideology. Finally, the fourth proposition in Veeser’s list seems merely to be a version of poststructuralist cultural relativism: “truth” changes historically, and so does “human nature.” While poststructuralist assertions of such relativism have themselves often seemed both novel and radical, poststructuralists have been quick to point out their indebtedness to Nietzsche and Nietzschean “genealogy” (as in Foucault’s essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”) if not to more traditional versions—perhaps including Marxist versions—of historicism
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