Position:Home>Books & Authors> Could someone explain New Historicism to me?

I'll give it a go!. I'm not sure which bit is causing the block in your brain (though I know the feeling all too well!), so please forgive me if I over-explain stuff you already get!.

The clue to New Historicism is in its name, really!. NH is about integrating literature and history!.

The heart and centre of a new historical approach is cultural context!. New Historicism focuses on a text from the point of view of the cultural moment at which it was written!. For instance, in New Historicism, one does not think of classics as "timeless", but instead examines them as part of an intricate web of social, political, and artistic thought current at the time they were produced!. Instead of looking at a novel as a self-contained entity, New Historicism looks beyond it to all the other texts, ideas, and narratives that were floating about at the time it was written and read!.

A New Historicist reading of a text does not confine itself to a close reading of the text alone!. Instead, a broad scope of secondary learning is required and brought into play!. The reading draws upon historical records, newspaper articles, scientific or political theories which were being batted about at the time etc to make its point!.

Applying different styles of literary theory to the same text will get you different results!. Take (as a random example) Stoker's 'Dracula'!. A Freudian reading of Dracula might talk about sexual fears, and suppressed anxieties expressed through metaphor!. A post-structuralist reading might focus on something like the narrative style of the letters and the way in which authority is presented!. However, a New Historicist writing about Dracula will probably talk about late nineteenth-century discoveries of germ theory, and fears of Eastern immigration at the turn of the century!. The key here is the context of historical ideas!.

The focus is not necessarily on the author 'writing for his time'!. A New Historicist reading might look at the way the author consciously interacts with contemporary issues, but more often it will also look at the unconscious way in which the text reflects the ideas and tensions of the time in which it was written, or at the ways in which it might have been read and understood by its audience at the time of publication!.

Why do this!? NH is a style of literary criticism which engages with human history as a history of ideas (rather than Great Men doing Great Deeds, one after the other)!. It's particularly interested in looking at how the text represents power, and comparing that to social power at the time of writing - so NH lends itself very well to certain kinds of feminist or post-colonial analysis!. One looks to the texts being created at a particular time in the hope that the history will help us to see new meaning in the text, and that at the same time the text will provide us with new insights into the ideas of the time!.

As with just about any lit theory, NH has its flaws!. It's not always clear how exactly the relationship between lived history and fictional novels works!. When undertaking a NH reading, you may occasionally find yourself getting in knots about whether a text - particularly a popular one - is simply blindly repeating contemporary ideas, or whether it itself is the source of a new idea then taken up by the people who read it!.

[Here's a rather crude example of the kind of thing I mean: Remember in Friends, when Ross and Rachel had the big fight over whether they were "on a break"!? After that, couples all over the place adopted the idea of "taking a break from us"!. Did Friends just give a handy name to a current way of thinking about relationships (thus fictionally recreating life in art), or did widespread consumption of the show slightly change the way people perceived relationships!? That's the kind of dilemma a NH reading may need to reconcile!.]

Obviously, this is only brushing the surface!. I haven't even mentioned Greenblatt or Foucault ; )

Does any of that make anything clearer at all!?Www@QuestionHome@Com

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