New Historicism

New Historicism
Name	New Historicism
Period	Late 20th century
Main influences	Cultural materialism; Marxism; Michel Foucault; Stephen Greenblatt; Quentin Skinner; Louis Althusser

New Historicism

New Historicism emerged in the late 20th century as a critical approach that situates literary texts within complex networks of power, culture, and historical practice, responding to formalist and New Criticism models exemplified by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Cleanth Brooks. Advocates drew upon theoretical interventions associated with Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Stephen Greenblatt, and Quentin Skinner to challenge ahistorical readings and to foreground reciprocal interactions among texts, institutions, and social actors such as monarchs, parliaments, courts, and salons.

Origins and theoretical foundations

New Historicism developed in dialogue with earlier movements including Italian Marxism linked to Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, British cultural studies by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, and post-structural theory associated with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. It arose amid academic debates shaped by institutions like Harvard University, Columbia University, and Yale University and intellectual events such as the publication of Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Derrida's Of Grammatology alongside historiographical shifts seen in works by Fernand Braudel and Natalie Zemon Davis. Political contexts including the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom influenced scholars at universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of California system. Legal and archival practices exemplified by the Public Record Office, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the British Library also shaped access to primary documents informing New Historicist inquiry.

Methodology and key concepts

Methodological precepts drew on archival research practices used by historians like E. P. Thompson and John Tosh and on discourse analysis informed by Foucault's genealogy. Central concepts included ideology as theorized by Louis Althusser, hegemony as developed by Antonio Gramsci, and the discourse-formation models associated with Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Scholars employed close reading techniques resonant with I. A. Richards and Geoffrey Hartman while integrating contextual probes into institutions such as the Tudor court, the Stuart monarchy, the Venetian Republic, and the Parisian Salon. Terms like cultural materialism emerged alongside concepts from social historians working on print culture, censorship, and the circulation of pamphlets linked to the Stationers' Company, the English Parliament, and the Royal Society.

Major proponents and influential works

Key figures include Stephen Greenblatt, whose works intersect with scholarship on William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; Jerome McGann, associated with textual scholarship and Romantic-era studies; Louis Montrose, known for Elizabethan studies; and Jonathan Dollimore, associated with cultural materialism and sexuality studies. Influential books and essays include Greenblatt's collections and essays that engage with the Globe Theatre, the Elizabethan court, and the publication histories preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the British Library; Montrose's essays on the Renaissance court masque and the Stuart succession; McGann's work on William Wordsworth and the Romantic canon; and Dollimore's studies that invoke the trial records of the Old Bailey and the Privy Council. Other notable scholars engaged dialogues with Quentin Skinner's contextualist method in intellectual history, Natalie Zemon Davis's microhistorical studies of early modern France, and Michael Baxandall's work on Renaissance perception and the merchants of Florence.

Applications in literary analysis

Practitioners applied New Historicist methods to texts by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Donne, John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and Aphra Behn, linking plays and poems to courts such as the Tudor and Stuart courts, to events like the Spanish Armada, the English Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution, and to institutions including the Inns of Court and the Royal Navy. Later applications addressed Romantic authors such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley while engaging with archives like the British Museum and the Huntington Library. New Historicist readings extended to modernist figures—T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce—and to colonial and postcolonial texts involving figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Chinua Achebe, and Frantz Fanon, often interfacing with debates shaped by the Indian National Congress, the Paris Commune, and the Atlantic slave trade. Scholars also examined material culture artifacts housed in institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum, documents from the National Archives, and visual objects from the Prado Museum and the Uffizi Gallery.

Criticisms and debates

Critics from different traditions raised challenges: formalists and New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom argued for text-centered analysis, while analytic philosophers and historicists like Quentin Skinner insisted on attention to authorial intention and speech-act contexts. Marxist critics debated ideological readings with scholars connected to the Communist Party and Trotskyist groups; postcolonial critics including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty questioned Eurocentrism and provinciality in archival focus. Feminist critics such as Judith Butler, Elaine Showalter, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar critiqued gender blind spots, prompting engagements with queer theory articulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and histories of sexuality researched by Michel Foucault and Thomas Laqueur. Empiricists working in the digital humanities and bibliographic studies—groups at the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association, and the British Association for Victorian Studies—debated reproducibility and methodological rigor.

Legacy and interdisciplinary influence

New Historicism influenced cultural materialism, performance studies, book history, legal history, and early modern studies in institutions like the Folger Institute, the Huntington Library, and university departments at Columbia, Berkeley, and Oxford. It reshaped curricula in English departments alongside shifts in history departments influenced by Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, and Fernand Braudel, and it informed museum exhibitions at the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Cross-disciplinary dialogues engaged anthropology through Clifford Geertz, sociology via Pierre Bourdieu, and film studies with scholars analyzing cinema in relation to state institutions such as Hollywood studios, the British Board of Film Classification, and national film institutes. The approach contributed to archival digitization projects at the National Archives, initiatives at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and collaborative research centers including the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and the Centre for Renaissance Studies at Warwick.

Category:Literary theory