New Historicism is a critical approach developed in the 1980s through the works of Michel Foucault and
Stephen Greenblatt, similar to Marxism. Moving away from text-cantered schools of criticism such as New
Criticism, New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical
milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end
product of a particular cultural moment. New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products
of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader
cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and
ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases that derive from their
historical position and ideology. Because it is impossible to escape one‘s own ―historicity,‖ the meaning of a
text is fluid, not fixed. New Historicists attempt to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical
context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history.
New Historicism differs from the old Historicism in large measure not based on the approach but rather on
changes in historical methodology, the rise of the so-called New history. The term new history was indebted
to the French term nouvelle histoire, itself associated particularly with the historian Jacques Le Goff and
Pierre Nora, members of the third generation of the Annales School, which appeared in the 1970s. The
movement can be associated with cultural history, history of representations, and histoire des mentalités.
While there may be no precise definition, the new history is best understood in contrast with prior methods
of writing history, resisting their focus on politics and “great men;” their insistence on composing historical
narrative; their emphasis on administrative documents as key source materials; their concern with
individuals’ motivations and intentions as explanatory factors for historical events; and their willingness to
accept the possibility of historians’ objectivity.
Since the 1950s, when Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault argued that each epoch has its own knowledge
system, which individuals are inexorably entangled with, many post-structuralists have used historicism to
describe the view that all questions must be settled within the cultural and social context in which they are
raised, answers cannot be found by appeal to an external truth, but only within the confines of the norms and
forms that phrase the question. This version of historicism holds that there are only the raw texts, markings
and artifacts that exist in the present, and the conventions used to decode them.
New Historicist scholars begin their analysis of literary texts by attempting to look at other texts—both
literary and non-literary—to which a literate public had access at the time of writing, and what the author of
the original text himself might have read. The purpose of this research, however, is not to derive the direct
sources of a text, as the New Critics did, but to understand the relationship between a text and the political,
social, and economic circumstances in which it originated.
Since Stephen Greenblatt, a Renaissance Shakespeare scholar, played a pivotal role in the rise of New
Historicism, the school developed largely in Shakespeare and English Renaissance Theatre studies. A major
focus of those New Historicist critics led by Moskowitz and Stephen Orgel has been on understanding
Shakespeare less as a genius than as a clue to the conjunction of the world of English Renaissance theatre
and the complex social politics of the time. The focus of new historical analysis is to bring to the foreground
the context and give it greater emphasis than previously recognized.
New Historicism developed in part based on the frustration of some literary scholars with the ahistorical
approach of New Criticism, and the formalist tendencies of the struturalist and post-structuralist approaches
that came after New Criticism. Yet, it also owes a debt to post-structuralism as well. It is distinct from the
older Historicism in large part because, “the movement follows poststructuralism in its assurance that
literary works mean any number of things to any number of readers (the doctrine of the plurality of
meaning), freeing New Historicists to find the warrant for their interpretations not in the author‘s intentions
for his work but in the ideology of his age. Similarly, the New Historicist effort to assimilate the literary text
to history is guaranteed by the poststructuralist doctrine of textuality, which states that the text is not aloof
from the surrounding context, that there is a contiguity, an ebb and flow, between text and whatever might
once have been seen as “outside” it.”