New Historicism — Complete Guide to Literature & Cultural Power
New historicism emerged in the 1980s as a reaction against both formalist criticism, which treated literature as autonomous, and old historicism, which treated it as a reflection of a unified historical background. New historicists argue that literature and history are mutually constitutive — texts shape the historical context they emerge from, and are shaped by it in turn. The approach transformed Renaissance studies and has since been extended to other periods and disciplines.
Core Principles
New historicism rejects the idea that history is a stable background against which literature can be read. Instead, it treats history as a text that must be interpreted, and literature as a participant in history. The boundary between literary and non-literary texts is blurred — legal documents, medical treatises, travel narratives, and trial records are read alongside poems and plays as evidence of a culture’s assumptions, anxieties, and power structures.
The Circulation of Social Energy
Stephen Greenblatt, the most prominent new historicist, argued that literary texts participate in the circulation of social energy — the charged language, emotions, and power relations that move through a culture. A play by Shakespeare is not a reflection of Elizabethan culture but a site where social energies are concentrated, transformed, and recirculated. Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) shows how Shakespeare’s theater drew on and contributed to the cultural practices of its time — exorcism, colonial encounter, legal examination.
Anecdotes and Marginal Texts
New historicists often begin their analyses with an anecdote or a marginal text — a document from a trial, a traveler’s account, a medical treatise — that seems peripheral to literature. The anecdote serves as a point of entry into the cultural system, revealing assumptions and anxieties that also animate literary works. Greenblatt’s reading of King Lear famously begins with an account of a 1582 exorcism, showing how the play engages with contemporary debates about spiritual possession, theatricality, and authority.
The Method
New historicist analysis typically involves juxtaposing a literary text with non-literary texts from the same period. The critic shows how both texts are shaped by the same cultural assumptions, power structures, and discursive practices. The goal is not to explain the literary text by reference to its historical context but to show how literature and history are mutually embedded.
Reading for Power
New historicism is deeply influenced by Michel Foucault’s analysis of power. Power is not something that is possessed and wielded from above but something that circulates through every level of society. It is produced in every relationship, every institution, every discourse. Literary texts can reinforce power relations or subvert them — but subversion, new historicists argue, is often contained by the very structures it challenges.
Like Marxist criticism, new historicism reads literature in relation to power, but it draws on a Foucauldian rather than Marxist model. Where Marxists emphasize economic base and class struggle, new historicists emphasize discourse, discipline, and the microphysics of power.
Key Figures
Stephen Greenblatt
Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) is the founding work of new historicism. He shows how sixteenth-century English writers like More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, and Shakespeare constructed their identities in relation to the power structures of the Tudor state. “Self-fashioning” — the idea that identity is not natural but constructed — became a key concept. Greenblatt argues that in the Renaissance, the self became something that could be shaped, performed, and presented, and that literary texts were central to this process.
Louis Montrose
Montrose’s work on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture demonstrates how new historicism attends to gender and power. His reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows how the play engages with contemporary debates about female authority and social order. Montrose’s essay on the play and Elizabethan gender politics is a model of the method — it reads the play alongside documents about Queen Elizabeth’s authority, showing how the text negotiates the tensions of a female monarch ruling a patriarchal society.
Catherine Gallagher
Gallagher extended new historicist methods to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work on the industrial novel, the body in literature, and the cultural history of economics shows how new historicism can be applied beyond the Renaissance. Her co-authored Practicing New Historicism (2000), with Greenblatt, is the best introduction to the method.
Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
Though not a new historicist himself, Foucault’s work on power, discourse, and the history of institutions provided the theoretical foundation for new historicism. His concept of “episteme” — the underlying structure of knowledge that organizes a particular historical period — and his analysis of disciplinary institutions (the prison, the clinic, the asylum) gave new historicists a model for analyzing how power operates through culture. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976) are essential background for understanding the new historicist approach to power.
Concepts
Self-Fashioning
The idea that identity is not natural but constructed — fashioned — in relation to social and political forces. Literary texts are sites where this fashioning is performed and contested. The concept challenges essentialist views of identity and anticipates later work in queer and gender theory.
Containment of Subversion
A controversial new historicist claim: that apparent subversion in Renaissance literature is ultimately contained by the power structures it seems to challenge. Shakespeare’s history plays, for example, stage rebellion only to reinforce the authority of the monarch. Critics argue that this containment thesis underestimates the genuinely subversive potential of literature.
A New Historicist Reading of The Tempest
To see the method in action, consider a new historicist reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The play — set on a remote island where the European Prospero rules over the native Caliban — can be read alongside contemporary accounts of English colonization in the New World. Greenblatt might juxtapose the play with William Strachey’s account of the 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda (a likely source) or with colonial documents describing English encounters with Native Americans. The reading would show that The Tempest does not simply reflect colonial ideology but participates in the cultural work of justifying English expansion. Prospero’s magic, his control over Caliban, and his eventual return to Europe all engage with contemporary debates about the legitimacy of colonial rule. The play both reinforces and complicates the assumptions that underwrite English colonialism.
New Historicism and Gender
Feminist new historicists have both drawn on and critiqued the approach. While new historicism’s attention to cultural construction aligns with feminist concerns, its tendency to emphasize containment over resistance has been contested. Critics like Jean Howard have shown that early modern women writers and readers found ways to resist patriarchal power even within a system that seemed to foreclose opposition. New historicist feminism asks how gender operated within the circulation of social energy — how women were represented, what they were permitted to say, and how they negotiated the constraints of their culture. This work has been especially influential in Renaissance studies, where it has transformed our understanding of women’s writing and reading in the period.
New Historicism Beyond the Renaissance
While new historicism began in Renaissance studies, it has been productively extended to other periods. Critics have applied new historicist methods to Romantic poetry, reading Wordsworth and Coleridge alongside contemporary documents about the French Revolution, industrialization, and the changing status of the natural world. Victorianists have used new historicist approaches to analyze novels by Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell alongside parliamentary reports, medical treatises, and reform literature. Americanists have read nineteenth-century American literature in relation to documents about slavery, expansion, and the construction of national identity. In each case, the method remains the same: juxtaposing literary and non-literary texts to reveal the circulation of social energy and the operation of power.
Critiques
Critics argue that new historicism overemphasizes power and containment, neglecting resistance and agency. It has also been criticized for ignoring gender and class in favor of a generalized analysis of power. Feminist critics argue that the containment thesis is particularly problematic for women writers, who were genuinely subversive by virtue of writing at all. Despite these critiques, new historicism remains a powerful approach to the study of literature and culture, especially for those interested in the politics of literary form.
FAQ
How is new historicism different from old historicism? Old historicism treated history as a stable background for literature. New historicism sees history and literature as mutually constitutive. Old historicism read literature to understand history; new historicism reads history to understand literature, and vice versa.
What kinds of texts do new historicists analyze? Any text from the period under study — not just literary works but also legal documents, medical treatises, travel narratives, diaries, sermons, trial records, and pamphlets. The goal is to reconstruct the discursive field in which literature participated.
Is new historicism still practiced? Yes. While its prominence has diminished since the 1990s, new historicist methods remain influential, especially in Renaissance and early modern studies. Many contemporary scholars combine new historicism with other approaches.
What is the relationship between new historicism and cultural studies? Both analyze culture in relation to power, but new historicism is more focused on the past and more rooted in literary studies. Cultural studies is broader, encompassing contemporary popular culture, media, and everyday life.
How do I write a new historicist analysis? Begin with a non-literary text or anecdote from the period. Juxtapose it with a literary work. Show how both texts are shaped by the same cultural assumptions and power structures. Do not simply use history to explain literature — demonstrate their mutual implication.
What is the containment of subversion thesis? The claim that literature that appears to challenge authority actually reinforces it by allowing the expression of dissent in a controlled form that ultimately confirms the existing power structure. This thesis has been controversial and widely debated.
For a comprehensive overview, read our article on Close Reading Techniques.