New Historicism

• one of the more recent criticisms

• One tenet is referentiality: Literature refers to—and is referred to by— things outside itself.

• Takes into account the politics underlying the production and publication of literary works; their publishing history and reception; the biography and bibliography of the author

• Questions whether truth can ever be purely and objectively known

• Seeks to treat literary works as historical documents

example: The Crucible is both a document of the Salem witch trials and a product of the McCarthyist 1950s

• Historical periods are treated as power struggles that leave their imprint on the artistic productions of their time.

• New Historicists are less likely to see history as linear and progressive.

• A New Historicist needs to be aware of the history of the period the work is set in, the history of the period in which the work was written, and the period in which we read and interpret the text.

• Historical biases run through all of the above.

• New Historicists do not seal off a work from the minds and lives of the creator and the audience

• Interested in the creator's intention with a literary work.

• Interested in the original reception of a literary work.

• One method of the approach is to juxtapose literary and non-literary texts in order to reveal the power struggles of the time.

• Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1937) is the leading New Historicist. His latest work on Shakespeare is Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. In it he examines how social, cultural, and political conditions of late-16th/early 17th-century England influenced Shakespeare's life and work.