In 1982 Stephen Greenblatt edited a special issue of Genre on Renaissance writing, and in his introduction to this volume he claimed that the articles he had solicited were engaged in a joint enterprise, namely, an effort to rethink the… Read More ›
New Historicism
Critical Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Inspired by the strong, determined character of his Aunt Augustine Jefferson, to whom the novel is dedicated, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman draws on the tradition of the slave narrative and its creative branch, the fictional autobiography. Slave narratives… Read More ›
Analysis of C. P. Snow’s Novels
Characterization is the foundation of C. P. Snow’s (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980) fiction. While theme and idea, as one might expect from a writer as political and engagé as was Snow, are important to his work, and… Read More ›
Literary Criticism and Theory in the Twentieth Century
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism
While he was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Greenblatt helped to found a journal called Representations, in which some of the earlier important New Historicist criticism appeared. However, it was his introduction to The Power of Forms in… Read More ›
Psychological Reader‑response Theory
Psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland believes that readers’ motives strongly influence how they read. Despite his claim, at least in his early work, that an objective text exists (indeed, he calls his method transactive analysis because he believes that reading involves… Read More ›
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
A term coined by Raymond Williams and popularised by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (in their collection of essays Political Shakespeare), Cultural Materialism refers to a Marxist orientation of New Historicism, characterised by the analysis of any historical material within… Read More ›
Foucault’s Influence on New Historicism
The anti-establishment ethos of New Historicism wasprofoundly influenced by Foucault‘s theories of Power/Knowledge and Discourse. Foucault observed that the discourse of an era brings into being concepts, oppositions and hierarchies, which are products and propagators of power, and these determine… Read More ›
New Historicism’s Deviation from Old Historicism
New Historicism envisages and practises a mode of study where the literary text and the non-literary cotext are given “equal weighting”, whereas old historicism considers history as a “background” of facts to the “foreground” of literature. While Old historicism follows… Read More ›
The Concept of Self-Fashioning by Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt, in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980) studies the sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Greenblatt examined the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the… Read More ›
The Textuality of History and the Historicity of Texts
Louis Montrose, in Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture claimed that New Historicism deals with the “textuality of history and the historicity of texts.” While “historicity of texts”refers to the “cultural specificity and social embedment of all… Read More ›
New Historicism: A Brief Note
A critical approach developed in the 1980s in the writings of Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism is characterised by a parallel reading of a text with its socio-cultural and historical conditions, which form the co-text. New Historians rejected the fundamental tenets… Read More ›