NEW HISTORICISM
taken from Chapter 9
Beginning Theory by Peter
Barry
Definition
New Historicism:
a method based on the parallel reading of
literary and non-literary texts, usually of
the same historical period.
Old&NEW historicism
New Historicism:
giving ‘equal weighting’ to literary and non-literary
material.
Old Historicism:
regarding the literary text as the object of value, and the
history as the ‘background’.
Old&NEW historicism
New Historicism:
interested in history as represented and recorded in
written documents, in history-as-text.
Old Historicism:
viewed the events in history as the setting.
TEXTS:
What new historicist do
• They juxtapose literary and non-literary
texts, reading the former in the light of the
latter.
• They try thereby to ‘defamiliarise’ the
canonical literary text, detaching it from the
accumulated weight of previous literary
scholarship and seeing it as if new.
•
They focus attention (within both text and
co-text) on issues of State power and how
it is maintained, on patriarchal structures
and their perpetuation, and on the
process of colonisation, with its
accompanying ‘mind-set’.
•
They make use, in doing so, of aspects of
the post-structuralist outlook, especially
Derrida’s notion that every facet of reality is
textualised, and Foucault’s idea of social
structures as determined by dominant
‘discursive practices’.
Sample research
• Louis Montrose’s essay: “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and
the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender,
Power, Form”
• M. Noor Rizal’s skripsi: “Konsep Politik dan Ekonomi dalam
Karya Prosa John Winthrop”
Louis Montrose
M. Noor Rizal
In John Winthrop’s prose works, there are depictions of ideal
political and economic based on what is predestined and
written in the Bible. The object of this research is a sermon,
essay and journal written by John Winthrop before and after
he arrived at the New World. The aim of this research is to
describe the characteristics of the ideal concept of political
institution which Winthrop envisioned and the reason why the
concept is carried on his writings by observing the textual
features like metaphors and analogies when John Winthrop
describes the ideal concept. To study this problem, this
research employs the New Historicism approach, historical
context of America to be compared which is taken from
several sources as well as theories of American Orientalism
proposed by Fuad Sha’ban. The textual features which build
the depiction of the ideal concept are juxtaposed with the
political and economic condition as the context of that era and
connected to the ideal concept’s orientalism.