How does New Historicism differ from old historicism?

Older historicism treated history as a stable 'background' to literature, whereas New Historicism treats text and context as mutually constitutive discourses within a network of power, with no single determining background.

Why do New Historicist essays often begin with an anecdote?

The anecdote, often drawn from a non-literary source, is used to open up a period's discourses and to unsettle the boundary between literary and historical material, a signature of the method.

New Historicism

New Historicism reads literary works alongside non-literary texts of their period, treating literature as one practice within a circulating network of cultural discourses and power.

Definition

A historicist critical practice that analyzes literary texts as participants in the wider system of discourses, institutions, and power relations of their historical moment.

Scope

This topic covers New Historicism (or 'cultural poetics') and the related British cultural materialism: their reaction against both formalism and a flattening 'background' historicism, their Foucauldian attention to power and discourse, the practice of juxtaposing canonical texts with anecdotes and archival documents, and the concepts of circulation, negotiation, and subversion-and-containment. It distinguishes these approaches and their characteristic methods.

Core questions

How do literary and non-literary texts of a period illuminate one another?
How is cultural and 'social energy' produced and circulated through texts?
Do literary works subvert or ultimately contain the power relations they represent?
What is the role of the anecdote and the archive in historicist reading?

Key theories

Circulation of social energy: Greenblatt's account of how cultural materials, anxieties, and pleasures are exchanged between literary works and the surrounding institutions and practices of a period.
Subversion and containment: The much-debated claim that apparently subversive energies in Renaissance texts may be produced and contained by the very power they seem to challenge, raising questions about literature's political agency.
Cultural materialism: The British counterpart, associated with Williams, Dollimore, and Sinfield, which similarly historicizes texts but stresses dissidence and the political uses of literature in the present.

History

New Historicism crystallized in early-1980s Renaissance studies, especially around the journal Representations and the work of Greenblatt, drawing on Foucault and anthropology. Veeser's 1989 collection mapped the movement, and Gallagher and Greenblatt's 2000 book reflected on its methods. In Britain, cultural materialism developed in parallel from the work of Williams and the 1985 collection Political Shakespeare.

Debates

Subversion or containment: Whether New Historicism's emphasis on containment makes literature politically quietist, in contrast to cultural materialism's stress on dissidence and on criticism's intervention in the present.

Key figures

Stephen Greenblatt
Catherine Gallagher
Jonathan Dollimore
Alan Sinfield

Seminal works

greenblatt1988
veeser1989
gallaghergreenblatt2000

Frequently asked questions

How does New Historicism differ from old historicism?: Older historicism treated history as a stable 'background' to literature, whereas New Historicism treats text and context as mutually constitutive discourses within a network of power, with no single determining background.
Why do New Historicist essays often begin with an anecdote?: The anecdote, often drawn from a non-literary source, is used to open up a period's discourses and to unsettle the boundary between literary and historical material, a signature of the method.