New Historicism Texts

Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night is chock-full of cross-dressing women and confused identities. And there’s lots of love and romance in there as well. How can it not be fun?So riddle me...

Drumroll please…and, it’s another comedy by William Shakespeare. This one’s full of magic, mischievous fairies, and lovers who fall in and out of love, for real reasons and sorcery-related on...

It’s a poem about a walk that Wordsworth took to the area surrounding Tintern Abbey, an old ruined abbey built in the Middle Ages. Doesn’t sound too exciting? Well, it is, especially when we pu...

This book’s about a journey into the Congo that goes way wrong. And it’s all about colonialism, imperialism, and the madness of greed. In what ways can an understanding of British imperialism d...

Marlowe’s play is a story about a Jewish merchant’s conflict with the Christian rulers of Malta who want to steal his money. Things get pretty ugly, and poor Barabas, the Jewish merchant, gets...

Here's the book that kick-started the New Historicist craze by talking about how cultural specifics shape the way writers live, think, and write. If there's anywhere to start to learn more about Ne...

In this Romantic-era-specific blockbuster in New Historicism criticism, Jerome McGann shows us how Romantic poetry engages with politics, social issues, and economics. Those Romantics were more com...

We can see just how useful a New Historicist approach is to the study of Romantic poetry in this collection of essays, which has contributions from four important New Historicist scholars consider...

Here we go with another very useful collection of essays by New Historicist critics. We’ll find readings of Renaissance and Romantic writers here as well as a bunch of theoretical essays that tie...

Okay guys—in case you were confused, New Historicism isn’t just a bunch of moldy abstract ideas; it’s a practice you can put to use in real life. In this book, two of the most important schol...