Paper Details

Name: Reetinder Joshi
Country: India

Year: 2014
Volume: Volume-1, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 22-24

New Historicism is a method of criticism to interpret a literary work of art, which takes its form as a reaction against New Criticism just as New Criticism came into being as a reaction against historical and biographical methods of literary criticism. For new critics, a literary text is an autonomous entity. They doubt history and concentrate on form . New Historicists believe that a literary work is the product of the time, place, and circumstances of its composition. Moreover, they argue that literary texts cannot be read and understood in isolation. They emphasize that literary texts must be read and interpreted in their biographical, social and historical contexts.
The major difference is that New Historicists tend to concentrate on those at the top of the social hierarchy (i.e. the church, the monarchy, the upper-classes) while Cultural Materialists tend to concentrate on those at the bottom of the social hierarchy (the lower-classes, women, and other marginalized peoples). The most influential figures associated with this school are Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt. Foucault‘s interest in issues of power, epistemology, subjectivity, and ideology has influenced critics not only in literary studies but also political science, history, and anthropology. Foucault picked up common terms and give them new meaning, thus changing the way critics addressed such pervasive issues as "power," "discourse," "discipline," "subjectivity," "sexuality," and "government."