new historicism
new historicism,a term coined by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt to describe his own and related approaches to the study of literature (superseding Greenblatt's earlier coinage, ‘cultural poetics’). It emphasizes contextualizing a work of literature within its larger milieu, and studying both the meaning and the function of the work as an element in a larger matrix of social power. Most characteristically, new historicists like to take an apparently unrelated minor text or historical anecdote from the Elizabethan period and prove that it exemplifies the same dominant ideologies they find informing Shakespeare's texts.
In its most characteristic forms in Shakespeare studies, the new historicism has drawn on elements of Marxism, the social theory of Michel Foucault, the anthropological theory and methods of Clifford Geertz, and a wide array of contemporary social theorists. It has taken as a particular polemical opponent previous...
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