Traditional Historicism vs. New Historicism
Literary Historicism = grasping the relationship
which links a literary work to its social and
historical context.
 do social and historical determinants
manifest themselves through literary works?
 Can a text, for example, John Carter of Mars, be
historically-informed even if it is set on Mars?
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History as written is an accurate view of what is
really occurred.
History serves as a background to literature.
Historical textual background is secondarily
important because the text mirrors the history of
its time.
applying the historical context to the texts the
critic believes that he or she can formulate a
more accurate interpretation of texts than if
s/he did not know such historical context.
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Reaction to the “text only” approach of
Formalism and New Criticism. (meaning can
be found only in the work itself, not in external
influences.)
New Historicists believe history is
subjective: one of many discourses.
History is shaped by the people who lived it.
◦ it does consider narrative archetypes but in the
context of the cultures that generate them
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Emphasizes “the interaction between historic
context of the work and modern reader’s
understanding and interpretation.”
consider both the cultural and social forces
that influenced the creation of a text and are
revealed through a text.
text as “culture in action,” little distinction
between an artistic production and any other
economic production
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history is not linear progression leading to
present day;
◦ a literary text does not have a single or easily
identifiable historical context.
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criticism should incorporate diverse discourses;
new historicism is informed by poststructuralist
theory, feminist, cultural, and Marxist criticism.
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literature = one more discourse that exists in
interaction with other discourses at a given
moment in history.
rejects a static view of the literary work as
transcendent, aesthetically and thematically
self-contained or isolated (a reaction to New
Criticism)
◦ Instead, a work is a dynamic ‘cultural poetics’
acknowledging “social and cultural
negotiations, transactions, and exchanges”
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Literature, therefore, becomes historicized, as
history becomes textualized
– Think then of ‘narratives of history’ or even
meta-narratives
“History is always a matter of telling a story about
the past.”
Two Strands of New Historicism:
Greenblatt and the American School
– literary discourse cannot subvert power since it is
always implicated in “the terms of the discourses
which hold … social order in place”.
– So since literature is part of society it ultimately cannot
fundamentally alter it
British and American
– re-inscribe a text within the discursive context
which produced it,
• a project which requires an imaginative recreation of the inter-discursive exchange
between the text and the other texts –
ideological, cultural, social- of its day.
• occupy “a position within, the writer’s ideological
frame of reference”, meaning that a text will
necessarily be apprehended from a certain
position –that of the critic reading in the
present- which is inconsistent with that of its
author or its original readers.
Creation is Cyclical
 examine not only the influence of the social,
cultural, and historical circumstances on the work,
but also the reception and significance of that
work in the past and present.
 Texts are social documents that reflect and
respond to their historical context.
 It’s kind of like a cycle…
Society/culture influences the
creation of a work
Work is published
Altered society/culture influences
the creation of a new work (rinse
and repeat)
Society/culture digests the work
and is changed by it in some small
(or large) way
4 emplotments Notice how similar this is to Frye
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Tragic, comic, romantic, and ironic.
generic deep-plot structures are shared between historians
and their audiences by virtue of their participation in a
common culture.
The kind of emplotment historians will employ is
determined by the dominant figurative mode of the
language they use to describe these events and story
elements.
four master tropes or modes of figurative representation –
metaphor, metonymy, synechdoque, and irony- which
correspond to the four types of emplotment.
Tropes are ineradicable from discourse, as are plots. Thus
history evokes reality: it does not reproduce or represent it.
“The Necklace” - Guy de Maupassant
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The Beginning:
◦ Mathilde Loisel mopes because she feels like
she deserves to be upper class.
◦ Her husband gains an invitation to a fancy
party where the upper class of the hierarchy
will be in attendance.
◦ she rejects the invitation, stating that she has
nothing to wear.
◦ given an allowance of four hundred francs and
with the idea of borrowing jewelry from a
friend she decides to attend.
◦ Mathilde borrows a exquisite diamond
necklace from her wealthier friend to wear to
the ball.
“The Necklace” - Guy de Maupassant
The Middle:
At the party she is the most coveted woman. Her
beauty, pose, and grace dazzle everyone at the
party.
Upon departing, she is forced to wear an old
shawl and ashamed of it, she hurries her husband
out of the party.
“The Necklace” - Guy de Maupassant
The End:
Returning home, Mathilde discovers the necklace is
missing.
Her husband spends all night searching for it, but to no
avail.
Mathilde and her husband quickly borrow money to buy an
expensive replacement necklace.
The next ten years of their life is spent paying back the
loans. To gather the money, they are forced to live as the
lower class, taking on servants work and living in a dingy
attic.
One day, Mathilde runs in to her rich friend; she discovers
the necklace that has ruined her life was actually a fake
and was only worth five hundred francs.
Maupassant's France…
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The France suffered massive debts to Germany in losing
the Franco-Prussian War.
◦ pay Germany 5 billion francs.
◦ France in a state of financial despair.
France had prominent social/economic caste system.
◦ Each citizen had their place within the structure
educational reform for girls
◦ Secondary schools taught them skills to become better
wives and mothers.
Guy de Maupassant himself
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His parents were part of a minor aristocracy.
◦ Their marriage was a failure and they separated when he was 11.
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worked as a civil servant although he hated the
bureaucracy.
promiscuous man, many affairs with various women
(including prostitutes )
stories often focus on how individuals are overcome by
their material desires and sensual hungers. – motivators
are lust, greed, and over-ambition.
– “victims of ironic necessity”
suffered from syphilis for most of his life and so
developed neurological, mental problems, and a bleak
outlook of life.