New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpreted within
the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic. Based on the literary criticism of
Stephen Greenblatt and influenced by the philosophy of Michel Foucault, New Historicism acknowledges
not only that a work of literature is influenced by its author’s times and circumstances, but that the critic’s
response to that work is also influenced by his environment, beliefs, and prejudices. A New Historicist looks
at literature in a wider historical context, examining both how the writer’s times affected the work and how
the work reflects the writer’s times, in turn recognizing that current cultural contexts colour that critic’s
conclusions.
Louis Montrose, for instance, has described some of these issues at length, and in his essay ―The Poetics and
Politics of Culture‖ (1986) he provides a list of concerns shared by New Historicists that agrees with and
extends Greenblatt‘s commentary. Like Greenblatt, Montrose insists that one aim of New Historicism is to
refigure the relationship between texts and the cultural system in which they were produced, and he
indicates that as a first step in such an undertaking, critics must problematize or reject both the formalist
conception of literature as an autonomous aesthetic order that transcends needs and interests and the
reflectionist notion that writing simply mirrors a stable and coherent ideology that is endorsed by all
members of a society. Having abandoned these paradigms, the New Historicist, he argues, must explain how
texts not only represent culturally constructed forms of knowledge and authority but actually instantiate or
reproduce in readers the very practices and codes they embody.
Montrose also suggests that if New Historicism calls for a rethinking of the relationship between writing and
culture, it also initiates a reconsideration of the ways authors specifically and human agents generally
interact with social and linguistic systems. This second New Historicist concern is an extension of the first,
for if the idea that every human activity is embedded in a cultural field raises questions about the autonomy
of literary texts, it also implies that individuals may be inscribed more fully in a network of social practices
than many critics tend to believe.
Louis Montrose‘s ―New Historicisms essay is too complex to summarize here, but among his concerns is
the characterization of new historicism as ―an academic site of ideological struggle between containment
and subversion. This struggle may be reduced to the following scenario. Critics who emphasize the
possibilities for the effective agency of individual or collective subjects against forms of domination,
exclusion, and assimilation have energetically contested critics who stress the capacity of the early modern
state, as personified in the monarch, to contain apparently subversive gestures, or even to produce them
precisely in order to contain them‖. Montrose wants to move beyond the containment/subversion binary
opposition to understand how these concepts are mutually complicit, and to suggest that while our
subjectivity/identity produced by discourse and material forces and relationships, we may also discover
facets of individual agency and the capacity for resistance: ―Thus my invocation of the term subject is meant
to suggest an equivocal process of subjectification: on the one hand, it shapes individuals as loci of
consciousness and initiators of action, endowing them with subjectivity and with the capacity for agency;
and, on the other hand, it positions, motivates, and constrains them within–it subjects them to–social
networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and contingency, that ultimately exceed their
comprehension or control.