In its
historicism and in its political interpretations, new historicism is indebted to
Marxism. But whereas Marxism (at least in its more orthodox forms) tends to see literature as part of a '
superstructure' in which the
economic 'base' (i.e.
material relations of production) manifests itself, new historicist thinkers tend to take a more nuanced view of
power, seeing it not exclusively as
class-related but extending throughout society. This view derives primarily from
Michel Foucault. In its tendency to see society as consisting of texts relating to other texts, with no 'fixed' literary
value above and beyond the way specific cultures read them in specific situations, new historicism is a form of
postmodernism applied to interpretive history. New Historicism is defined as an approach that expands the traditional scope of literary history. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this approach incorporates a wide range of cultural and textual sources into its analysis, including literary and nonliterary documents, visual materials, films, photographs, monuments, rituals, everyday myths, customs, and symbolic practices. New Historicism does not reject canonized texts outright; rather, it repositions them within their historical and cultural contexts, thereby making visible meanings that may have been overlooked or lost during the process of canonization. Within this framework, the primary aim of the approach is to systematically examine the cultural practices that enable the emergence of literary works. New historicism shares many of the same theories as with what is often called
cultural materialism, but cultural materialist critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups. Cultural critics also downplay the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and often focus predominantly on the productions of "popular culture" (Newton 1988). New historicists analyse text with an eye to history. With this in mind, new historicism is not "new". Many of the critiques that existed between the 1920s and the 1950s also focused on literature's historical content. These critics based their assumptions of literature on the connection between texts and their historical contexts (Murfin & Supriya 1998). New historicism also has something in common with the
historical criticism of
Hippolyte Taine, who argued that a literary work is less the product of its author's imaginations than the social circumstances of its creation, the three main aspects of which Taine called
race, milieu, and moment. It is also a response to an earlier historicism, practiced by early 20th century critics such as
John Livingston Lowes, which sought to de-mythologize the creative process by reexamining the lives and times of
canonical writers. But new historicism differs from both of these trends in its emphasis on
ideology: the political disposition, unknown to the author that governs their work. There is a popularly held recognition that Foucault's ideas have passed through the new historicist formation in history as a succession of
épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture (Myers 1989). It is indeed evident that the categories of history used by new historicists have been standardized academically. Although the movement is publicly disapproving of the periodization of academic history, the uses to which new historicists put the Foucauldian notion of the épistémè amount to very little more than the same practice under a new and improved label (Myers 1989). ==Criticism==