Poetry: New Historicism

Overview

With a simple declarative statement, noted Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt laid the foundation for what would become New Historicism, a mode of cultural inquiry that would change the direction of literary theory in the final two decades of the twentieth century. In his seminal volume Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988), Greenblatt acknowledges, “I began with the desire to speak to the dead.”

Desire is the keystone of New Historical inquiry, which aims to explore the past through its documents and to do so not as objective observers governed solely by reason, but as subjective participants fully cognizant that scholarly impartiality is impossible. Human interests are never far from human emotions. Thus, human passion governs human inquiry. New Historicism, in its efforts to examine the material and ideological elements that governed people’s lives in specific time periods, is “conversing with the dead” through examining literary and historical texts. However, the living control this conversation. In their approach to the past, New Historians can be considered time-traveling reporters. Primarily, these critics are interested in how literature functions as a political tool, as a by-product of power, and as part of cultural reproduction.

New Historicism is characterized by a desire to understand not only the work of literature—indeed, any creative work—but also the context in which the work was composed. In particular, New Historicism wants to understand the cultural ideologies (belief systems) present at the time a work was formed. For New Historicists, the question is not solely, What is this poem about? but What cultural contexts informed the writing of this poem? Answers to the latter question are discerned through consideration of related texts from the same period. Unlike New Criticism, a theoretical predecessor that insisted a literary work stand independent of its author, culture, and era, New Historicists insist the opposite. A work can be understood only by considering it in the surrounding framework of ideas circulating at the time of its composition. In contrast, the art for art’s sake movement, frequently associated with New Criticism, sought to distance art and literature from the cultural contexts of their derivation.

New Historians refuse to place literature in a vacuum, apart from power structures. They seek to establish a relationship between sources of power within a society and the works of art and literature produced by a society. New Historicists are not seeking “truths” about civilization. Indeed, truths for New Historians are not givens; rather, truths are cultural constructs. What is “true” in a society depends on who or what is in power. For New Historicists, history is not a neat compilation of events over time, but a complex and tangled record of the evolution of ideas. They ask questions such as, What were humans thinking, when were they thinking it, and why were they thinking it? During the Renaissance, for example, why did people believe in the Great Chain of Being, in which pampered kings and queens were only one link from God and hardworking peasants only one link above beasts? For the New Historicists, textual analysis can never reveal the truths of a society or an age, but it may provide clues to an understanding of the social construction of truth.

Despite its emergence and popularity in Renaissance studies, New Historical approaches can be applied to various genres and eras of literature. All types of cultural “texts,” from novels to comic books, from films to postcards, from architecture to furnishings, can be accessed and analyzed through the methodologies of New Historicism. For the purposes of this overview, examples of New Historical methods will be drawn primarily from poetry.

Historical criticisms

The word “new” seemingly separates New Historicism as a mode of inquiry from “old” historical approaches, but the claim that there are “old” and “new” approaches is perhaps a misnomer. Many traditional historical approaches to literary and cultural analysis are still in practice; this fact suggests that they are not outdated, nor have they been replaced by New Historicism. To better understand how New Historicism is distinct from its predecessors and contemporaries in the field of historical inquiry, it is important to understand the ways in which their various theories and methodologies diverge.

Traditional historical inquiry suggests that to understand a work of literature, the scholar must first investigate the author’s life and background, the society in which the author lived, and the prevailing ideas of the time. Traditional historical critics give preeminence to the literary text, with historical texts providing supporting background material. For instance, an understanding of the sewer system, or the lack of one, in eighteenth-century London elucidates the black humor of Jonathan Swift’s poem “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), which lists in graphic detail the various items of refuse that wash through the streets of the city during a rainstorm. As Steven Lynn points out in Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory (1994), “The modern reader who is unaware of the sanitary problems in Swift’s day may find the poem’s imagery incredible.” Thus, one aspect of traditional historical criticism is to prove the veracity of a literary text. The content of the poem is valid because historical data supports its description of a London street at the time in which the poem was composed.

Biographical criticism is closely connected to historical criticism as it relates the author’s life events or beliefs to the work produced. However, despite connections between lived experiences and creative expression, it is simplistic to equate the life of the poet with his or her poetry and then go no further. American poet Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” (1966) conjures up images of a brutish father, but her biography provides no such evidence of abuse. The fact that her father died when she was a child seems the most injurious of his crimes. Still, this fact allows an entry into the poem, and information about her subsequent relationships with men provides even greater insight. Biographical research allows scholars to connect the “Daddy” of the title with various men in Plath’s life. It becomes a metaphor for the men who rejected the poet over her lifetime and not her particular birth father.

There are significant differences between New Historicism and traditional historical research. Historians generally believe in documented facts and a linear progression of civilization. They believe certain eras can be characterized by a specific belief system; for instance, the Great Chain of Being is considered by traditional historians to be an organizing principle for Elizabethan society. New Historicists resist such codifying and are more likely to eschew facts and reveal the flaws in grand schematics.

Another important difference is the New Historicist’s predilection for minutiae rather than for extant texts, and their tendency to reach “local” conclusions rather than proclaim overarching judgments. Rather than explicate an entire work like John Milton’s twelve-book Paradise Lost (1667), a New Historicist will focus on a few lines of various texts, perhaps a passage from book 1 of Paradise Lost, a paragraph from a religious treatise of the era, and a paragraph from a surviving letter from Milton to his daughter, and then treat the three partial texts as equals. Unlike traditional historical approaches that rely on historical information as a subtext for greater understanding of a literary work, New Historicism refuses to privilege either the literary or the historical text. Instead, practitioners of New Historicism explore a history of ideas that employs the technique of cross-reading. Literary texts are read to glean history and historical texts are read to understand literature.

Origins and founders

The decade of the 1980s marked the emergence of New Historicism as a recognized mode of inquiry in literary and cultural studies. It followed on the heels of and in reaction to New Criticism (1940s-1970s), which maintained that the text of a literary work was sacrosanct. New Critics focused exclusively on properties integral to a poem, particularly its formal and linguistic qualities, and rejected biographical or historical contexts as unnecessary to an understanding and appreciation of a poem. The poet, the era, and the circumstances of a poem’s composition were of no concern to the New Critics. The poem, in and of itself, provided the key to understanding.

Prior to the influx of new critical approaches, literary scholars had engaged in historical research, but the New Historicism that emerged in the 1980s was unlike its forerunners. Practitioners of New Historicism were informed by other, more radical criticisms that developed in the 1970s, including reader-response, feminist, and Marxist approaches. Questioning the status quo was a common practice on university and college campuses, where many emerging theorists, such as French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault and American literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, were professors. Particularly in light of the Civil Rights and women’s movements and of organized opposition to the Vietnam War, rethinking the status quo was popular in higher education. Foucault, Greenblatt, and others extended this line of questioning back through time and reexamined accepted historical truths. This reexamination led to their publications as New Historicists: Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977) and Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations. Foucault had been questioning social institutions since the early 1960s, publishing, among other works, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961; Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 1965), which examines the social construction of madness and its accompanying discourse over a number of centuries, and Naissance de la clinique: Une Archéologie du regard médical (1963; The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, 1973), which looks at the establishment of medical hospitals and the training of doctors, again across an extended period of time. New Historicism was the new name for his approach, but Foucault preferred to think of himself as just another French intellectual. New Historicists embraced his ideas and borrowed liberally from his terminology as they engaged in countercultural inquiries of their own.

Beliefs and methodologies

While its main founder, Greenblatt, is a noted Renaissance scholar associated with the field of English literature, the range of New Historicists is vast. In addition to literary scholars, New Historicism includes cultural critics, anthropologists, and historians, all of whom work across the curriculum, utilizing methods from various disciplines and sharing epistemological tools. Given this diversity of backgrounds, interests, and methods, it is not surprising that disagreements emerge among New Historicists. Even Greenblatt regrets the term “New Historicism.” He prefers to call his approach a poetics of culture.

In his introduction to The New Historicism (1989), editor H. Aram Veeser identifies five epistemological threads that connect practitioners of New Historicism. First, Veeser notes that “every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices,” suggesting that even a simple couplet at the end of a sonnet, a type of expressive act, is the product of the cultural milieu from which it originated. Second, he notes that “every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes,” an admission that any claim to objective inquiry is a fallacy. New Historicists are vulnerable to and operate within the same cultural power grids that produced the texts they study. There is no still-point in the universe from which to conduct textual analyses. Critics, like the writers whose works they study, are the products of a particular culture and age. New Historicists are cognizant of their inherent biases and frequently acknowledge them in the course of their writings.

Veeser’s third observation is “that literary and non-literary ’texts’ circulate inseparably,” a recognition of the interdependence of texts, ranging from poetry to legal writings, composed in the same time period. Veeser’s fourth point, “that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature,” points out perhaps the one constant in the history of human ideas and social structures: These ideas and structures are subject to change. The trajectory of social structures is not necessarily an evolutionary line of progress, but a chaotic diaspora of beliefs and practices. Human history is messy, as is writing about the texts that are both by-products and chronicles of that history. Point five, “that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe,” is related to the second point. Most New Historicists, even those who espouse socialism, are the products of capitalism, the dominant economic ideology of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the process of describing and analyzing the texts that capitalism has produced, or even the texts that predate capitalism, they cannot escape the system they critique.

In brief, New Historicists approach a text from a contextual standpoint, identifying ideologies that informed its composition. They look at interconnections between historical and literary texts. For instance, they consider how changes in the rights of women as revealed in a legal document produced in the Elizabethan age connect to the portrayal of women in light verses composed in the same period. New Historicists consider the systems of meaning—whether economic, medical, educational, legal, religious, or political—available to the writer at the time the work was composed and consider how the work is a product of these systems. Furthermore, New Historicists are not averse to skipping eras and showing relationships between cultures and practices across time and space. New Historicists do this not to suggest linear progression but instead to emphasize the randomness of coincidental events over the development of linked patterns.

Terminology

A number of terms appear frequently in scholarship by New Historicists and in works about New Historicism. Crucial to an understanding of New Historicism are the following terms: “discourse,” “power,” “representations,” and “self-positioning.” “Discourse” refers to a vocabulary associated with a particular group of people with a shared knowledge. The discourse allows members to communicate with each other, define standards for outsiders, and keep those who do not share their specialized knowledge out of the discussion. Discourses exist in areas such as law, medicine, higher education, and sports. Foucault’s three-volume Histoire de la sexualité (1976-1984; History of Sexuality, 1978-1987, 3 vols.), for example, notes the frequency with which psychiatrists and sexologists invented new terms for human sexual behavior, determining what was acceptable and what was reprehensible through this vocabulary. Foucault further notes how views toward sexuality shifted as a result of this specialized and expanding discourse.

“Power,” along with ethics and truth, is a means by which humans are subjugated by the societies in which they exist. Foucault believes that power is a construct, not a reality. Power is associated with knowledge; to possess knowledge, particularly specialized knowledge, as is the case with government leaders, surgeons, and college professors, for example, is to be able to wield power over others. Power gives one the authority to determine whether something is true or false, acceptable or repugnant, valid or invalid. For New Historicists, truth is a construct backed by power.

The idea and term “representations” is central to New Historicism, so much so that the title of the journal founded by Greenblatt is Representations. “Representation” means that which is opposed to reality. Because New Historicists question the nature of reality—because reality is often defined by those in power—the preferred term to describe phenomena is “representations.” History becomes not just one story, but many stories through representations. How people from diverse backgrounds and times view events differs dramatically. No single representation can claim the truth. Similarly, self-positioning refers to the fallibility of the scholar who cannot step outside history to evaluate the phenomena of humanity. The term is a reference to the inevitable subjectivity of all human inquiry.

Opposition

The popularity of New Historicism continues to grow, as evidenced by the increasing number of scholarly articles and books that employ this method of inquiry, including Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), which reached a popular audience and became a bestseller. However, New Historicism’s detractors are also increasingly evident. Opponents object to the ideological scrutiny under which works of literature are placed by New Historicists, including their emphasis on socially constructed and socially enforced belief systems. Detractors argue that such a politically charged focus detracts from an enjoyment and appreciation of poems, plays, short fiction, and novels. They argue, for example, that they want to read Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591), not as evidence of repressive sexual politics in the sixteenth century, but as a classic love story. Other critics, who hark back to New Criticism, desire a return to textual meaning. More traditional methods of historical criticism aim toward the recovery of a text’s original meaning; New Historicists question the very notion of an obtainable meaning. The author’s intentions, often the product of social forces beyond the writer’s control or ken, are irrecoverable.

Late twentieth-century conservative pundits George Will and William Bennett perceive something much more sinister at work in New Historicism: the complete eradication of shared cultural values. New Historicism is argued to be a vehicle by which liberal intellectuals disrupt any semblance of aesthetic norms. Greenblatt countered this perception in an interview, noting that

One thing that’s very puzzling about the ferocity of some of these attacks is that—though they’re often mounted in the name of American culture, what George Will calls our “social cement”—they seem to me oddly hostile to democratic currents in America, to our ability to absorb lots and lots of different things and make them our own.

Bibliography

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Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Greenblatt Reader. Edited by Michael Payne. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005.

Laden, Sonja. “Recuperating the Archive: Anecdotal Evidence and Questions of ’Historical Realism.’” Poetics Today 25, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 1-28.

Lynn, Steven. “Connecting the Text: Biographical, Historical, and New Historical Criticism.” In Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory. 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008.

Robson, Mark. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Ryan, Michael. “History.” In Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction. 2d ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007.

Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The New Historicism Reader. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Wilson, Scott. “The Economimesis of New Historicism (Or, How New Historicism Displaced Theory in English Literature Departments).” Journal for Cultural Research 11, no. 2 (April, 2007): 161-174.