New Historicism Basics
New Historicism Basics
The Who, What, Where, When, and Why of New Historicism
Beginnings
Back in the 1970s in California, a group of young academics from all kinds of different disciplines—among them literary critics, art historians, historians, and anthropologists—met randomly in...
Big Players
New Historicism didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Early New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher were inspired by three theorists: Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, and R...
Key Debates
The New Historicists’ biggest enemies are the New Critics. These two schools have serious beef with one another: when everyone calls themselves New, who gets to be the newest? New Historicism eme...
State of the Theory
New Historicism isn’t quite as much the rage as it was in the 1980s, when it was as hot as swatches and never washing your hair so it would frizz out Madonna-style. Today there’s a sense that,...
Talking the Talk
What is literature? Everything is literature! A Youtube video, twerking, King Lear, the Super Bowl are all “texts” that we can analyze as New Historicists. As long as we do this new thing of pu...