Analysis Of New Historicism

It could be reasonably argued that the first step toward an understanding of this theory is exchanging views on culture, power relations, and history in a particular society. Tom Fish and Meredith Anne Skura affirm that

New Historicism deals more specifically with the issues of power (the ways in which dominant group exerts its influence over others) and culture (social forces of constraint and mobility), and to the plays’ effect on power relations in the new world. (qtd. in N-avarro 14)

The most obvious way of illustrating the culture over the past centuries is considering the various discourses in literary texts. New Historicism has changed the way in which we are obliged to think about the culture over the past centuries through literary

Marry Ann Thomas quotes from Jonathan Dollimore a proponent of New Historicism, much of the work of New Historicists is explicitly concerned with the operations of power (qtd. in Thomas 3). Indeed the reason to analyze the literary texts using New Historicism approach is to show the culture. One of the methods of beginning a New Historicist analysis by Stephen Greenblatt is to recount an anecdote which contains image of the power relations for that matter. The anecdote belongs to general documents or practices firmly grounded in the historical travel narratives, penal documents, historical testimonies, confessional narratives. It enables the critic to discover in minute pieces of text the larger structures and operations of power, and to show how power extends its operations from minute anecdotes to the more complex texts embedded in a particular society or culture (1998, 133-134). Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt proclaim

While this section will be led by discussion of Greenblatt's work, other New Historicisms need to be acknowledged. The simultaneous historicizing of the Romantic period, led by Gerome McGann, relies more on hermeneutics than the anthropological and Foucauldian methods applied to the Renaissance by Greenblatt. The Romantic period, closer to our own, has arguably provided the tradition formative of current critical orthodoxy. (2005,