Just a few notes on Historical and New Historicism---refer to class powerpoint for more info.

 

 

Historical Criticism. Using this theory requires that you apply to a text specific historical information about the time during which an author wrote. History, in this case, refers to the social, political, economic, cultural, and/or intellectual climate of the time. For example, William Faulkner wrote many of his novels and stories during and after World War II, which helps to explain the feelings of darkness, defeat, and struggle that pervade much of his work.

 

The basic premise of Historical criticism is that literary meaning is grounded in the author. The author is the context in which the work is studied and is the cause of the work's meaning. Historical criticism is the search for the author's original intention. To ask what a literary work means, according to the historical critic, is to ask what the author meant when he or she created it. In order to study the author as context, it is necessary for the historical critic to examine the work against its historical surroundings and determine how these surroundings worked with the individuality of the author and the individuality of the age to create and define the text.

 

Historical literary criticism focuses mainly on the subject's relevance, relationship with, and influence upon the historical period in which it was written. A historical critic looks at how the time period influenced the writing of the work as well as how events in the author’s life influenced him or her. A work of historical criticism posits a thesis about the author or time period based on the subject. Thus historical criticism looks at texts in the same way as a historian looks at historical documents: in order to learn what they reveal about the historical and socio-cultural circumstances in which they were produced.

 

New Historicism shares this interest in the historical context within which texts were produced, but also acknowledges that the act of reading texts is as much a product of the historical context within which it is done as the writing of texts is. It thus sees interpretation as both a creative activity and as a process which is never-ending, as each successive generation of readers’ experiences texts from the past from the perspective of a new social/ historical context.

 

New Historicism focuses on the sociological and cultural influences of a work. Culture is the context in which the work is studied, and sometimes new historicism is referred to as cultural criticism. New historicism stresses that there are no "universal truths," no "natural behavior," that no text can offer a transparent window to historical fact, and that the text is a product of social causes and a producer of social effects. Therefore, the new historicist's task is complex. He or she must scrutinize the historical causes and consequences of a text while also attending to the historical and cultural conditions of the text's production.