New Historicism

What is ‘New Historicism’?

It is an approach to literary criticism and literarytheory based on the premise that a literary work should be considered a productof time, place, and historical circumstances of its composition rather than asan isolated work of art or text.
Reactingagainst both the formalist view of the literary text as somehow autonomous andMarxist views which ultimately related texts to the economic infrastructure.
It saw the literary text as a kind of discourse situated within a complex of cultural discourses which both shaped it, and in their turn, were shaped by it.
Drawn from Foucault and post-structuralism, that “history” itself is a text, an interpretation, and that there is no single history.
The production, categorization and analysis of texts were determined by forces of history which in turn shaped the cultural work itself.
New historicism has made the relation between text and society its predominant concern.