Concept of Historicism

Historicism: New Historicism and Old
Historicism
Course Teacher: Rama Islam, PhD

10-06-2021
Thursday
Historicism
Historicism is an approach to writing about
literature primarily focusing on history.
New Historicism
New Historicism is a perspective that seeks to reconnect the text with the
time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and
political movement of the time.
It is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary

texts usually of the same historical period. It refuges to privilege the
literary text. Instead of literary ‘foreground’ and historical ‘background’,
it gives equal importance on literary and non-literary texts which
constantly inform and interrogate each other.
To understand the real meaning of a text reading historical event is very

important
• As the prominent new historicist critic
Stephen Greenblatt has put it:
“The work of art is the product of a negotiation
between a creator or class of creators,
equipped with a complex, communally shared
repertoire of conventions, and the institutions
and practices of society”. (Greenblatt 1989:
12)
New Historicism and New Criticism
New Historicism is a reaction against New
Criticism. Not concerned with only the text, but
the context (political, social, economic) where
the text was originated.
American Movement
In New Criticism (1920s and 1930s), New Critics are

too much concentrated on language and text.
To Understand New Historicism
• Historicism: There is something related to History. History places upon a text.
• New Historicism challenges the formalist’s concept meaning.
• Where Meaning Lies:
Context: (Political, Social, Economic). In literary text the actual thoughts, feelings
or intensions of the author can never be covered or reconstructed. The world
of the past was replaced by the words of the past.
To tell about the theory, let’s go to the background that:

1. Who was the author?
How did his or her life influence the work?
2. What was the time period of the text like?

How does the setting influence meaning?
Origin and Critics of New Historicism
1. New Historicism is a critical approach that developed
in 1980s and 1990s. The term is coined by the
American critic Stephen Greenblatt. His book
Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to
Shakespeare (1980) which is regarded as its beginning.
2. During the 1970s J. W. Lever in The Tragic State: A
Study of Jacobean Drama challenges the conservative
critical views about Jacobean theatre and links the
play much more closely with the political events of
that time.
3. American critic Louis Montrose thinks New Historicism is “A combined interest in
the ‘textuality of history’ and ‘historicity of text’”. The approach emphasizes that
there is no privileging of the literary text.
4. E.M.W. Tillyard: Elizabethan World Picture (1943) and Shakespeare’s Historical

Plays (1944)
4. Michel Foucault, a post-structuralist and cultural historian: Epistomy means

knowledge. He goes into the context and meaning. He goes back to the prevailing
idea. Theory on Power and control (like Marxism) to discourse. To him:
“Power is a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their
acting or being capable of action” (“Subject”220)
5. Jacque Derrida, deconstructionist.: “There is nothing outside the
text”- Eth was within the text. Historicity, context, political and
writer’s background
6. Harold Aram Vasser : The New Historicism (1989), a volume of

essays. Luis Montrose wrote an essay “The Midsummer Night’s
Dream” and “Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender,
Power , Form”
Anecdote (tale, story, one person’s life): Co-text and Context.

Luis Montrose in the essay- Elizabethan dream, not Shakespeare’s
dream, dream of someone in 1597, 23 Jan of that time.
Main ideas of New Historicism
1. It places the literary text within the frame of
nonliterary text
2. Historical documents are not subordinated as
‘contexts’, rather it is used as ‘co-text’
3. The text and the co-text are seen as expressions of
same historical moments.
4. ‘Equal weight’ is given to literary and non-literary
texts
5. It is an approach to literature in which there is no
privileges of a literary text
New Historicism and Old Historicism
1. New Historicism involves the parallel study of literary and non-
literary texts and Old Historicism gives importance history as context
of the background (not important literary and nonliterary works)
2. To old or traditional historicists, history is a series of events that has
a casual relationships. They believe that through objective analysis,
we are perfectly capable of uncovering the facts about historical
events and those facts sometimes reveal the spirit of the age.
In History: study of past event in terms of the spirit of the age: Age of
Reason or Age of Enlightenment
In Literature: Study literary works in terms of historical periods:
Neoclassical, Romantic, Modern and Postmodern
Traditional Historicists believe that history is progressive and
over the course of time human species are involved and
advanced in its moral, cultural and technological
accomplishment.
New Historicists think that we have a clear access to any but
the most basic facts of history. For example: 1971 of
Bangladesh, French Revolution
3. New Historicists emphasize on strictly a matter of
interpretation not dry fact. Old historians are attached to
the facts, the way they contextualize those facts which
determine what facts those text will tell.
4. Traditional literary historians assert that a literary text embodies the author’s
intention and illustrate the spirit of the age. They emphasize that literary texts
are self-sufficient art objects that transcend the time and place in which they
were written.
New Historicists think that literary texts are cultural artifacts that can tell us
something about the interplay of discourses, the web of social meanings,
operating in the time and place in which the text was written. For them, the
literary texts and the historical situation from which it emerged as equally
important because text and context are mutually constitutive: they create each
other.
So, literary texts shape and are shaped by their historical context. For example:
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . For the traditional historicism, the historical
accuracy of the text must be judged by the comparisons with the historical
accounts of the populations represented. For New Historicism, historical
accuracy is never a certainty. (Anti colonialism and Eurocentricism)
Difference between
Traditional Historicist New Historicist
1. What happened? 1. How the event has been
interpreted?
2. Cause and effect : A caused B
2. NH does not support causation. It
and B caused C
works on interpretation
3. History is being Objective: 3. Subjective and Skeptical
Facts are fact 4. History is textual (History and
4. History is knowable and stable literature are interconnected,
(it exist and has a presence) Literature creates history)
5. Literature is inter-textual (fiction
5. Literature mirrors historical
influences history and history
reality (History comes first, influences fiction)
then literature) 6. Knowledge is power (How is
6. Objective views of history knowledge created?)
What New Historicists Do?
The Critics of New Historicism:
1. Juxtaposes literary and non-literary texts. They read,
understand, analyse and try to find meaning
literature in the light of history.
2. Defamiliarize the canonical literary text
3. Focus attention on both co-text and text
4. Accept the aspects of post-structuralist outlook
especially Derrida’s notion that ‘every faced of reality
is textualized’. There is nothing outside the text.
Other Times of Historicism
1. Post-colonialism (culture and cultural clash)
2. Cultural Studies (examine one particular
cultural idea revealed in the text)
3. New Historicism (meaning and time in the
text) fact of history applied in the text
Conclusion
New literary historical critics think:
Through its representation of human experience
at a given time and place, the literary text is an
interpretation of history. It maps the
discourses calculating at the time it was
written and is itself one of those discourses.
Thank You

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Historicism: New Historicism and Old

Course Teacher: Rama Islam, PhD

It is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary

To understand the real meaning of a text reading historical event is very

In New Criticism (1920s and 1930s), New Critics are

To tell about the theory, let’s go to the background that:

2. What was the time period of the text like?

4. E.M.W. Tillyard: Elizabethan World Picture (1943) and Shakespeare’s Historical

4. Michel Foucault, a post-structuralist and cultural historian: Epistomy means

6. Harold Aram Vasser : The New Historicism (1989), a volume of

Anecdote (tale, story, one person’s life): Co-text and Context.

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