An Appeal from the New to the Old Historicists

matter on new historicism.

This essay on New Historicism was published in 1991 for an issue of Text and Performance dedicated to the critical methods of the time.

The aim of this paper is to present the basic principles of new historicism through analysing Stephen Greenblatt's two works: Resonance and Wonder and Invisible Bullets since new historicism is highly associated with Stephen Greenblatt. Social, political, and economic elements designate the literary works of a society. New Historicism will be explored in detail through considering the relationship between history and literature as literary works are regarded as historical texts according to this criticism; however, it will be concluded that fiction and history are storylike narratives.

Textual Practice, 2010

This paper examines the theory of New Historicism by looking at its tenets and theorists behind it.

English Literary Renaissance, 1986

From Plato to present day literarily theory and criticism constructed varied platforms to analyze and interpret literature. Aristotle’s poetics deals with poetry and tragedy. It is the first written document which precisely defines tragedy and speaks about anagnorasis, peripeitiea, hamartia, hubris, catharsis. Later after nearly two centuries Horace and Longinus created the standards of good and noble poetic craft. Philip Sydney in 1579 in his ‘An Apology for Poetry’ placed poetry well above all other studies. Later during the Neo-classical age John Dryden in his ‘Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ discussed merits and demerits of various streams of poetic talents. In 1798 with the publication of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ by William Wordsworth and S T Coleridge, the diction, metre in poetic craftsmanship searched for commonplace themes. Wordsworth declared ‘Poet is the man speaking to men’. S T Coleridge in his ‘Biographia Literaria (1817)’ goes on length to separate the mechanical admixture of creative ideas that is fancy with that of organic creation that is imagination. In Victorian age Mathew Arnold stations criticism and creativity at equal altitude. Mathew Arnold’s Touchstone method garnered importance to the style of ancient poetic masters. Later in the modern age the Classicist and Modernist T S Eliot explains the poetic process with that of creation of Sulphuric acid in the presence of platinum flint. T S Eliot says that poet’s mind works like a catalyst in the creation of a poem untainted by the process or elements of poetic creation….which led to the creation of ‘Impersonality Theory’ My paper deals with the critical theories during the modernism and post modernism and post modernism laying emphasis on New Historicism as the amicable tools of literary analysis.

History and Theory, 2000

In recent discussions of the work of new historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, it has often been remarked that the theory of history underlying their reading practice closely resembles that of postmodern historiographers like Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. Taking off from one such remark, the aim of the present article is twofold. First, I intend to provide a theoretical basis from which to substantiate the idea that new historicism can indeed be taken to be the literary-critical variant of what Frank Ankersmit has termed the "new historiography." In the second half of the article, this theoretical foundation will serve as the starting point of a further analysis of both the theory and practice of new historicism in terms of its distinctly postmodern historiographical project. I will argue that in order to fully characterize the new historicist reading method, we do well to distinguish between two variants of postmodern historicism: a narrativist one (best represented in the work of Michel Foucault) and a heterological one (of which Michel de Certeau's writings serve as a supreme example). A brief survey of the two methodological options associated with these variants (discursive versus psychoanalytical) is followed by an analysis of the work of the central representative of new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt. While the significant use of historical anecdotes in his work leaves unresolved the question to which of either approaches Greenblatt belongs, the distinction does serve a clear heuristic purpose. In both cases, it points to the dangerous spot where the new historicism threatens to fall prey to the evils of the traditional historicism against which it defined itself.

Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 2003

and wider historical span than he allows. Goldstein's book is full of dense analysis that is provocative and often rewarding, but not always easy reading. Its primary audience will be those already knowledgeable in ancient Near Eastern history of the first millennium B.C.E.

History and Theory, 1997

It may be just as unfair to judge a book by its title as by its cover, but A New Philosophy of History raises expectations which the editors of this collection of essays cannot, and perhaps never intended to fulfill. The editorial introduction by Hans Kellner ("Describing Redescriptions") modestly redefines the content and purpose of the volume as a taking stock of the "redescriptions" of reflection on history (historical theory) and writing about history (historiography), that have occurred in the past quarter century within the Anglo-American academic world. These redescriptions, he suggests, involved a wideranging shift in focus. Evaluations of historical writings according to scientific models which emphasized the empirical verifiability of specific statements and the logical viability of explanations (arguments of cause and effect), and in which language was perceived "as something to be looked through," were replaced by models drawn from rhetoric and poetics. The latter models emphasized the linguistic/textual density of historical works, in which language was "something to be looked at," and which presented issues of authority or credibility in terms of genre conventions and the subjective "expectations and be-