A literary theoretical approach (cultural poetics) (1980s)
Founder Stephen Greenblatt (1943-)
New Historicists aim simultaneously to understand a literary work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature, which documents the new discipline of the history of ideas.
New Historicists believe:
– that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
– that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
– that literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparably;
– that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature;
– […] that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.
H. Aram Veeser. The New Historicism (1989)