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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section New Historicism

Introduction, general overviews.

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Feminist Studies
New New Historicism, or New Materialism

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New Historicism by Neema Parvini LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0015

New historicism has been a hugely influential approach to literature, especially in studies of William Shakespeare’s works and literature of the Early Modern period. It began in earnest in 1980 and quickly supplanted New Criticism as the new orthodoxy in early modern studies. Despite many attacks from feminists, cultural materialists, and traditional scholars, it dominated the study of early modern literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Arguably, since then, it has given way to a different, more materialist, form of historicism that some call “new new historicism.” There have also been variants of “new historicism” in other periods of the discipline, most notably the romantic period, but its stronghold has always remained in the Renaissance. At its core, new historicism insists—contra formalism—that literature must be understood in its historical context. This is because it views literary texts as cultural products that are rooted in their time and place, not works of individual genius that transcend them. New-historicist essays are thus often marked by making seemingly unlikely linkages between various cultural products and literary texts. Its “newness” is at once an echo of the New Criticism it replaced and a recognition of an “old” historicism, often exemplified by E. M. W. Tillyard, against which it defines itself. In its earliest iteration, new historicism was primarily a method of power analysis strongly influenced by the anthropological studies of Clifford Geertz, modes of torture and punishment described by Michel Foucault, and methods of ideological control outlined by Louis Althusser. This can be seen most visibly in new-historicist work of the early 1980s. These works came to view the Tudor and early Stuart states as being almost insurmountable absolutist monarchies in which the scope of individual agency or political subversion appeared remote. This version of new historicism is frequently, and erroneously, taken to represent its entire enterprise. Stephen Greenblatt argued that power often produces its own subversive elements in order to contain it—and so what appears to be subversion is actually the final victory of containment. This became known as the hard version of the containment thesis, and it was attacked and critiqued by many commentators as leaving too-little room for the possibility of real change or agency. This was the major departure point of the cultural materialists, who sought a more dynamic model of culture that afforded greater opportunities for dissidence. Later new-historicist studies sought to complicate the hard version of the containment thesis to facilitate a more flexible, heterogeneous, and dynamic view of culture.

Owing to its success, there has been no shortage of textbooks and anthology entries on new historicism, but it has often had to share space with British cultural materialism, a school that, though related, has an entirely distinct theoretical and methodological genesis. The consequence of this dual treatment has resulted in a somewhat caricatured view of both approaches along the axis of subversion and containment, with new historicism representing the latter. While there is some truth to this shorthand account, any sustained engagement with new-historicist studies will reveal its limitations. Readers should be aware, therefore, that while accounts that contrast new historicism with cultural materialism—for example, Dollimore 1990 , Wilson 1992 , and Brannigan 1998 —can be illuminating, they can also by the terms of that contrast tend to oversimplify. Be aware also that because new historicism has been a controversial development in the field, accounts are seldom entirely neutral. Mullaney 1996 , for example, was written by a new historicist, while Parvini 2012 was written by an author who has been strongly critical of the approach.

Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . Transitions. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26622-7

Introduction to new historicism and cultural materialism aimed at the general reader and student, which does much to elucidate the differences between those two schools. In doing so, however, it is perhaps guilty of oversimplification, especially as regards the new historicists, who, according to Brannigan, never progress beyond the hard version of the containment thesis.

Dollimore, Jonathan. “Critical Developments: Cultural Materialism, Feminism and Gender Critique, and New Historicism.” In Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide . New ed. Edited by Stanley Wells, 405–428. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

A cultural-materialist take on “critical developments” over the decade of the 1980s that elaborates on the differences between new historicism and cultural materialism. Useful document of its time, but be aware of identifying new historicists too closely with the containment thesis it outlines, which became softer and more nuanced in later new-historicist work.

Hamilton, Paul. Historicism . New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 1996.

DOI: 10.4324/9780203426289

Guide to wider tradition of historicism from ancient Greece to the late 20th century. Chapters on Michel Foucault and new historicism usefully view both subjects through this wider lens, although some of the nuances (for example, the differences between new historicism and cultural materialism) are lost along the way. See especially pp. 115–150.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. “New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, Alan Sinfield.” In Shakespeare and Literary Theory . By Jonathan Gil Harris, 175–192. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Structured into three parts: the first on Foucault, the second on Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets” (see Greenblatt 1988 , cited under Essays ), and the third on the cultural materialist Sinfield. Concise, if cursory, overview. Its focus on practice rather than theory renders it too specific to serve as a lone entry point, but useful introductory material if considered alongside other accounts.

Mullaney, Steven. “After the New Historicism.” In Alternative Shakespeares . Vol. 2. Edited by Terence Hawkes, 17–37. New Accents. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

By its own admission a “partisan account” (p. 21) of new-historicist practice by one of its own foremost practitioners. Argues that the view of new historicism become distorted through oversimplification. Reminds us of the extent of new historicism’s theoretical and methodological innovations, which detractors “sometimes fail to acknowledge” (p. 28).

Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

DOI: 10.5040/9781472555113

More comprehensive in coverage than other available guides, perhaps owing to its more recent publication. Features a timeline of critical developments, a “Who’s Who” in new historicism and cultural materialism, and a glossary of theoretical terms. Includes sections on Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault and offers clear distinctions between early new-historicist work and “cultural poetics.”

Robson, Mark. Stephen Greenblatt . Routledge Critical Thinkers. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

Although centered on Greenblatt, this book effectively doubles as an introduction to new historicism and its concepts. Lucidly written, it features some incisive analysis and a comprehensive reading list to direct further study.

Wilson, Richard. “Introduction: Historicising New Historicism.” In New Historicism and Renaissance Drama . Edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton, 1–18. Longman Critical Readers. New York and London: Longman, 1992.

Gains from being very theoretically well informed. Argues that new historicism is best understood, ironically, if historicized in the context of Ronald Reagan’s America and the final years of the Cold War. An excellent entry point to understanding new historicism and its concerns. A section contrasting cultural materialism with new historicism closes the piece.

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24 What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?

When we use New Historicism or cultural studies as our lens, we seek to understand literature and culture by examining the historical and cultural contexts in which literary works were produced and by exploring the ways in which literature and culture influence and are influenced by social and political power dynamics. For our exploration of these critical methods, we will consider the literary work’s context as the center of our target.

New Historicism is often associated with the work of Stephen Greenblatt , who argued that literature is not a timeless reflection of universal truths, but rather a product of the historical and cultural contexts in which it was produced. Greenblatt emphasized the importance of studying the social, political, and economic factors that shaped literary works, as well as the ways in which those works in turn influenced the culture and politics of their time.

New Historicism also seeks to break down the boundaries between high and low culture, and to explore the ways in which literature and culture interact with other forms of discourse and representation, such as science, philosophy, and popular culture.

One of the key principles of New Historicism is the idea that literature and culture are never neutral or objective, but are always implicated in power relations and struggles. It also emphasizes the importance of the reader or interpreter in shaping the meaning of a text, arguing that our own historical and cultural contexts influence the way we understand and interpret literary works. When using this method, we often talk about cultural artifacts as part of the discourse of their time period.

New Historicism has been influential in a variety of fields, including literary and cultural studies, history, and anthropology. It has been used to analyze a wide range of literary works, from Shakespeare to contemporary novels, as well as other cultural artifacts such as films and popular music.

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing literature that emerged in the late 20th century. Unlike traditional literary criticism that focuses solely on the text itself, cultural studies criticism explores the relationship between literature and culture. It considers how literature reflects, influences, and is influenced by the broader cultural, social, political, and historical contexts in which it is produced and consumed.

In cultural studies literary criticism, scholars may examine how literature intersects with issues such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and power dynamics. The goal is to understand how literature participates in and shapes cultural discourses. This approach emphasizes the importance of considering the cultural and social implications of literary texts, as well as the ways in which literature can be a site of contestation and negotiation.

Key concepts in cultural studies literary criticism include hegemony, representation, identity, and the politics of culture. Scholars in this field often draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, to analyze and interpret literary works in their cultural context. We will explore these approaches to literature in more depth in future parts of the book.

Learning Objectives

Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse. (CLO 2.1
Using a literary theory, choose appropriate elements of literature (formal, content, or context) to focus on in support of an interpretation (CLO 2.3)
Emphasize what the work does and how it does it with respect to form, content, and context (CLO 2.4
Understand how context impacts the reading of a text, and how different contexts can bring about different readings (CLO 4.1)
Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing how textual interpretation can change given the context from which one reads (CLO 6.2)
Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

Scholarship: An Excerpt from the Introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, is widely credited with the ideas about history that led to the development of New Historicism as an approach to literary texts. In this passage, Foucault explains his aims in proposing that history does not consist of stable facts. Understanding Foucault’s approach to history is necessary for understanding the New Historicism critical approach to literature.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations. My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this, transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used; my aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities (whether world-views, ideal types, the particular spirit of an age) in order to impose on history, despite itself, the forms of structural analysis. The series described, the limits fixed, the comparisons and correlations made are based not on the old philosophies of history, but are intended to question teleologies and totalisations; in so far as my aim is to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme, it is clear that the theory that I am about to outline has a dual relation with the previous studies. It is an attempt to formulate, in general terms (and not without a great deal of rectification and elaboration), the tools that these studies have used or forged for themselves in the course of their work. But, on the other hand, it uses the results already obtained to define a method of analysis purged of all anthropologism. The ground on which it rests is the one that it has itself discovered. The studies of madness and the beginnings of psychology, of illness and the beginnings of a clinical medicine, of the sciences of life, language, and economics were attempts that were carried out, to some extent, in the dark: but they gradually became clear, not only because little by little their method became more precise, but also because they discovered – in this debate on humanism and anthropology – the point of its historical possibility. In short, this book, like those that preceded it, does not belong – at least directly, or in the first instance – to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too. This work is not an exact description of what can be read in Madness and Civilisation, Naissance de la clinique, or The Order of Things. It is different on a great many points. It also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms. Generally speaking, Madness and Civilisation accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an ‘experiment’, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history; in Naissance de la clinique, the frequent recourse to structural analysis threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem presented, and the level proper to archaeology; lastly, in The Order of Things, the absence of methodological signposting may have given the impression that my analyses were being conducted in terms of cultural totality. It is mortifying that I was unable to avoid these dangers: I console myself with the thought that they were intrinsic to the enterprise itself, since, in order to carry out its task, it had first to free itself from these various methods and forms of history; moreover, without the questions that I was asked,’ without the difficulties that arose, without the objections that were made, I may never have gained so clear a view of the enterprise to which I am now inextricably linked. Hence the cautious, stumbling manner of this text: at every turn, it stands back, measures up what is before it, gropes towards its limits, stumbles against what it does not mean, and digs pits to mark out its own path. At every turn, it denounces any possible confusion. It rejects its identity, without previously stating: I am neither this nor that. It is not critical, most of the time; it is not a way of saying that everyone else ‘ is wrong. It is an attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity; rather than trying to reduce others to silence, by claiming that what they say is worthless, I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure. ‘Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you, are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?’ ‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’

After reading this brief excerpt from Foucault’s approach to history, how do you feel about his assertion that there are no stable facts, that history is essentially like any other text that we can deconstruct? Is there such a thing as “objective” or “true” history? Why or why not? How does this approach compare with what you learned about deconstruction in our previous section?

Scholar Jean Howard has said of the historical/biographical criticism (which we studied in part one) that it depends on three assumptions:

“history is knowable”;
“literature mirrors…or reflects historical reality”;
“historians and critics can see the facts objectively” (Howard 18).

Foucault and the New Historicists reject these three assumptions.

Cultural Studies: From “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular'” by Stuart Hall

Now let’s look at an example of Cultural Studies criticism: Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.'” Hall, a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist, was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies. He explored the process of encoding and decoding that accompanies any interaction readers have with a text. When Hall talks about “periodisation” in the passage below, he is discussing historians’ and literary theorists’ attempts to classify works through “periods” (e.g., the English Romantic poets; the Bloomsbury Group , etc.). Hall extends this difficulty to the phrase “popular culture,” which is often used in cultural studies criticism.

First, I want to say something about periodisations in the study of popular culture. Difficult problems are posed here by periodization—I don’t offer it to you simply as a sort of gesture to the historians. Are the major breaks largely descriptive? Do they arise largely from within popular culture itself, or from factors which are outside of but impinge on it? With what other movements and periodisations is “popular culture” most revealingly linked? Then I want to tell you some of the difficulties I have with the term “popular.” I have almost as many problems with “popular” as I have with “culture.” When you put the two terms together the difficulties can be pretty horrendous. Throughout the long transition into agrarian capitalism and then in the formation and development of industrial capitalism, there is a more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor. This fact must be the starting point for any study, both of the basis for, and of the transformations of, popular culture. The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout that history revealed themselves, time and again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions and ways of life of the popular classes. Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense. And one of the principal sites of resistance to the forms through which this “reformation” of the people was pursued lay in popular tradition. That is why popular culture is linked, for so long, to questions of tradition, of traditional forms of life, and why its “traditionalism” has been so often misinterpreted as a product of a merely conservative impulse, backward-looking and anachronistic. Struggle and resistance—but also, of course, appropriation and ex -propriation. Time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. “Cultural change” is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the centre of popular life, actively marginalised. Rather than simply “falling into disuse” through the Long March to modernization, things are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place. The magistrate and the evangelical police have, or ought to have, a more “honoured” place in the history of popular culture than they have usually been accorded. Even more important than ban and proscription is that subtle and slippery customer—“reform” (with all the positive and unambiguous overtones it carries today). One way or another, “the people” are frequently the object of “reform”: often, for their own good, of course—in their “best interest.” We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”— yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the labouring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. Popular culture is neither, in a “pure” sense, the popular traditions of resistance to these processes; nor is it the forms which are superimposed on and over them. It is the ground on which the transformations are worked. In the study of popular culture, we should always start here: with the double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.

Now that you’ve read examples of scholarship from these two approaches, what similarities and differences do you see? Despite significant overlaps—both approaches consider power structures and view texts as artifacts, for example—Cultural Studies tends to have a broader scope, incorporating insights from various cultural disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. New Historicism focuses more specifically on the interplay between literature and history. Additionally, Cultural Studies may engage more directly with contemporary cultural and political issues, while New Historicism tends to focus on historical periods and their relevance to understanding literature.

How to Use New Historicism and Cultural Studies as Critical Approaches

When using a New Historicism or cultural studies approach to analyze a literary text, you should consider the connections between the text and its historical context. With cultural studies, you will also consider how the text influenced and was influenced by popular culture, and how the text’s reception changed over time. You can do this in a variety of ways. Here are a few approaches you might consider. Some of them such as author background, reader response, and identifying power dynamics will feel familiar to you from previous chapters.

Research the Historical Context: Investigate the time period in which the literary work was written. Explore political events, social structures, economic conditions, and cultural movements.
Author’s Background: Examine the life and background of the author. Consider their personal experiences, beliefs, and the historical events that may have influenced them.
Identify Power Dynamics: Analyze power relationships within the text and in the historical context. Consider issues of class, gender, race, and other forms of social hierarchy.
Interdisciplinary Approach: Draw on insights from various disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, and political science to enrich your understanding of the historical and cultural context.
Cultural Artifacts: Treat the literary work as a cultural artifact. Identify elements within the text that reflect or respond to the cultural values, norms, and anxieties of the time.
Dialogues with Other Texts: Explore how the literary work engages with other texts, both literary and non-literary. Look for intertextual references and consider how the work contributes to broader cultural conversations (the discourse Foucault talks about).
Language and Literary Techniques: Analyze the language, narrative structure, and formal elements of the text. Consider how these literary techniques contribute to the overall meaning and how they may be influenced by or respond to historical factors.
Ideological Critique: Investigate the ideologies present in the text and how they align with or challenge the dominant ideologies of the historical period. Consider the ways in which literature participates in ideological struggles. We will explore more specific examples of how to do this when we focus on Marxism and Postcolonial Studies in our next section.
Social and Cultural Constructs: Examine how social and cultural constructs are represented in the text. This includes exploring representations of identity, social norms, and cultural practices.
Historical Events and Allusions: Identify direct or indirect references to historical events within the text. Consider how the events are portrayed and what commentary they offer on the historical moment.
Historical Change and Continuity: Assess how the text reflects or responds to processes of historical change and continuity. Consider whether the text aligns with or challenges prevailing attitudes and structures.
Reader Response: Reflect on how the historical context might shape the way readers interpret and respond to the text. Consider how the meaning of the text may evolve across different historical and cultural contexts.

You do not need to consider every aspect of the text mentioned above to write an effective New Historicism analysis. You can focus on one or a few of these elements in your approach to the text.

As noted above, a cultural studies critical approach is similar to New Historicism but focuses more on the text as it is received in a particular culture, with more emphasis on intersectionality. A cultural studies approach may consider a variety of artifacts in addition to literary texts (such as film and other media) for analysis. A cultural studies approach might also consider how cultural influences, receptions, and attitudes have changed over time.

Let’s look at how do do these types of criticism by applying New Historicism to a text.

Applying New Historicism Techniques to Literature

As with our other critical approaches, we will start with a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). After you complete your close reading of the poem and find evidence from the text, you’ll need to look outside the text for additional information to place the poem in its context. I have provided some additional resources to demonstrate how you might do this. Looking at the text within its context will help you to formulate a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text, using New Historicism as your critical method.

“Lament for Dark Peoples”

I was a red man one time, But the white men came. I was a black man, too, But the white men came.

They drove me out of the forest. They took me away from the jungles. I lost my trees. I lost my silver moons.

Now they’ve caged me In the circus of civilization. Now I herd with the many— Caged in the circus of civilization.

The first thing we need to know is more about Langston Hughes as a poet. Who was he? When did he write? What was the cultural context for his writing? We can go to Wikipedia as a starting point for our research, but we should not cite Wikipedia. Instead, we will want to find higher-quality literary scholarship to use in our analysis.

The open source article “ Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language” by Christine Dualé informs us that “Hughes gained his reputation as a “jazz poet” during the jazz era or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s” ( Dualé 1). Dualé quotes a study of Black poets during the Harlem Renaissance that provides some context for this poem: “Many black intellects were disquieted by the white vogue for blackness. They recognized how frivolous and temporal it was, and the extent to which their culture was being admired for all the ‘primitive’ qualities from which they wished to be distanced” ( Dualé quoting Archer Straw).

This quote helps us to understand lines 9-12 of the poem, where Hughes describes the “circus of civilization” that he felt under the gaze of this “white vogue for blackness.”

In considering the question of social constructs and power dynamics during this period, we need to know more about the Harlem Renaissance, preferably looking for contemporary sources that describe this period. JSTOR is a good database for this type of research. I limit my search by year to get five results, and I choose an article from Alain Locke (in part, because I already know enough about the Harlem Renaissance to know that Locke was an important part of it—it’s totally acceptable to use your own existing knowledge of the historical context, if you have it, to guide your research!).

This image shows a page from JSTOR with search limiters for the years 1920 through 1940, researching Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.

When I read “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” written by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke in 1928, I quickly find the prevailing social construct that the dominant intellectual culture at the time (white American men) had formed about African American writers during the period when this poem was written. I have quoted from the first page of the article below:

THERE are two distinctive elements in the cultural background of the American Negro: one, his primitive tropical heritage, however vague and clouded over that may be, and second, the specific character of the Negro group experience in America both with respect to group history and with regard to unique environing social conditions. As an easily discriminable minority, these conditions are almost inescapable for all sections of the Negro population, and function, therefore, to intensify emotionally and intellectually group feelings, group reactions, group traditions. Such an accumulating body of collective experience inevitably matures into a group culture which just as inevitably finds some channels of unique expression, and this has been and will be the basis of the Negro’s characteristic expression of himself in American life. In fact, as it matures to conscious control and intelligent use, what has been the Negro’s social handicap and class liability will very likely become his positive group capital and cultural asset. Certainly whatever the Negro has produced thus far of distinctive worth and originality has been derived in the main from this source, with the equipment from the general stock of American culture acting at times merely as the precipitating agent; at others, as the working tools of this creative expression (Locke 234).

In reading this article, it’s important to note that the author, Alain Locke, is a noted African American scholar and writer and the first African American to win a prestigious Rhodes scholarship. He is widely considered to be one of the principal architects of the Harlem Renaissance. What does this passage tell us about the social constructs and contemporary views of African Americans in the late 1920s, when Langston Hughes wrote “Lament for Dark Peoples”? What important historical context seems to be “missing” or glossed over from this cultural description of African Americans in the 1920s? Hint: It’s only 60 years since President Lincolin signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet we see no explicit mention of slavery here.

Now to consider how history and context changes, I might also look for a contemporary appraisal of Langston Hughes’s work in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.

Again, I do a JSTOR search, limiting to articles from 2018 through 2023. I get 157 results using the same search terms. Clearly, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance are playing a prominent role in our contemporary scholarly discourse, especially in the fields of literature, history, and cultural studies. In fact, there’s even a journal called The Langston Hughes Review ! I choose an article from this journal entitled “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later” by Wallace Best, Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University.

An image of a JSTOR search for Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance with the date limiters 2018-2023

In this article, I get some corroboration for what my search results have already told me: “Langston Hughes, one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, is having a renaissance all his own” (Best 1).

Best goes on to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s role in our culture has shifted since his death:

“There is good reason for all this attention. Arguably one of the most significant writers in United States history, Hughes has left an indelible mark, culturally and politically, on American society. Hailed in his lifetime mainly as the “Poet Laureate of the African American community,” he is now generally embraced as one of the most important poets speaking to, and on behalf of, all Americans. Since his death in May 1967, his writing, particularly his poetry, has been invoked to articulate both our loftiest hopes and our deepest fears as a nation. Seldom has there been a national crisis or an important political event in the United States over the last half-century in which his work has not been recounted. Speakers from across the social, ideological, and political spectrum, from Tim Kaine, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry to Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama have cited Hughes’s powerful compositions. His poetry has helped to shape our country’s thinking about itself, our often-troubled past, and our continuing hope for a brighter, more enlightened future.”

With these three external sources and the original poem, I can now begin to think about the kind of thesis statement I want to write.

Example of a New Historicism thesis statement: In one of his earlier poems, “Lament for Dark Peoples,” African American poet Langston Hughes makes a powerful argument against the “circus of [white] civilization (line 12), demonstrating how the cultural norms toward marginalized peoples in place during the early twentieth century damaged all Americans.

I would then use the evidence from the poem as one cultural artifact, including the additional sources I found to provide more context for when the poem was written, the social constructs and power dynamics in place at that time, and the shifts in culture that have now made Langston Hughes a poet for “all Americans” (Best 1).

With New Historicism, because we are considering the context, we must cite some outside sources in addition to the text itself. Here are the sources I cited in this section:

Works Cited

Best, Wallace. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later.” The Langston Hughes Review , vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–5. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.5325/langhughrevi.25.1.0001 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Dualé, Christine. “Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language.” Angles. New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 7 (2018). https://journals.openedition.org/angles/920 . Accessed 3 Oct. 2023. Locke, Alain. “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , vol. 140, 1928, pp. 234–47. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1016852 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

One additional note: depending on your approach, it would also be appropriate to borrow research techniques from historians for a New Historicism analysis. This might involve working with archive primary source documents. One example of this type of document that I found in my research on the Harlem Renaissance is this one from the U.S. Library of Congress entitled “The Whites Invade Harlem.”

As noted above, a cultural studies approach would be similar to a New Historicism approach. However, if I were using cultural studies, I might want to focus on the difference between the text’s critical reception when it was published (how it affected and was affected by the discourse in the 1920s) and the text’s critical reception today, focusing on the explosion of academic interest on Langston Hughes’s work in since 2018. I would then look at the particular aspects of culture, such as the election of America’s first Black president and the backlash this created in popular culture, as well as the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia and how this was reflected in popular culture. For example, I could consider how twenty-first century scholarship focusing on Langston Hughes is one example of a larger desire for inclusion and representation of marginalized groups in literature, what we sometimes refer to as “exploding the canon” (Renza 257).

Limitations of New Historicism and Cultural Studies Criticism

While New Historicism offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness of literature and historical context, it also has its limitations. Here are some potential drawbacks:

Relativism: New Historicism can sometimes be accused of cultural relativism, as it emphasizes understanding a text within its specific historical context. This might lead to a reluctance to make broader judgments about the quality or significance of a work across different times and cultures.
Overemphasis on Power Relations: Critics argue that New Historicism can place an excessive focus on power dynamics and political aspects, potentially neglecting other important elements of literary analysis, such as aesthetics or individual authorial intentions.
Determinism: There’s a risk of determinism in assuming that a text is entirely shaped by its historical context. This approach may downplay the agency of individual authors and the role of artistic creativity in shaping literature.
Selective Use of History: Scholars employing New Historicism may selectively use historical evidence to support their interpretations, potentially overlooking contradictory historical data or alternative perspectives that challenge their readings (don’t do this!)
Overlooking Textual Autonomy/Author Authority: Critics argue that New Historicism sometimes neglects the autonomy of literary texts, treating them primarily as reflections of historical conditions rather than as creative and independent entities with their own internal dynamics.
Tendency for Presentism: There’s a risk of imposing contemporary values and perspectives onto historical texts, leading to anachronistic interpretations that may not accurately reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which the work was created (note how I initially looked for scholarship from the time period of the text I was analyzing above).

These limitations do not mean we shouldn’t use New Historicism; rather, they suggest areas where a more balanced and comprehensive approach to literary analysis may be necessary.

Similarly, cultural studies might place an overwhelming emphasis on cultural factors, sometimes neglecting economic or political considerations that could also shape social dynamics. The relativist stance of cultural studies may hinder critical evaluation and potentially overlook harmful practices or ideologies.

New Historicism and Cultural Criticism Scholars

New historicism.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who viewed history as a text that could be deconstructed. Foucault’s concept of “the discourse” is essential to both New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism.
Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) is the American Shakespeare scholar who coined the term “New Historicism.”

Cultural Studies

Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was a Jamaican-born British philosopher and cultural theorist whose ideas were influential to the development of cultural studies as a field.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher and thinker whose ideas about media were foundational to cultural studies.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher and critic who focused on the importance of context over text in approaches to literary works.
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French philosopher whose 1967 essay “L’Morte de Auteur” critiqued traditional biographical approaches to literary criticism.

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Literary Research

Literary Research: New Historicism

What is new historicism.

"New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a particular cultural moment. New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases that derive from their historical position and ideology. Because it is impossible to escape one’s own “historicity,” the meaning of a text is fluid, not fixed. New Historicists attempt to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history."

Brief Overviews:

New Historicism/Cultural Poetics (Literary Theory Handbook)
New Historicism (The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism)
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (A Companion to Literary Theory)

Notable Scholars:

Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt, Stephen, and Michael Payne. The Greenblatt Reader . Blackwell Pub., 2005.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture . Routledge, 1990.
Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism . University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. University of California Press, 1988.

Louis Montrose

Montrose, Louis Adrian. “‘ Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power. ” English Literary Renaissance , vol. 10, no. 2, 1980, pp. 153–82.
Montrose, Louis Adrian. “New Historicisms.” In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies . Edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 392–418. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992.

Hayden V. White

White, Hayden. “ The Historical Text as Literary Artifact .” Clio , vol. 3, no. 3, 1974, pp. 277–303.
White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
White, Hayden V. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Introductions & Anthologies

Also see other recent eBooks discussing or using new historicism in literature and scholar-recommended sources on new historicism and Hayden White via Oxford Bibliographies.

Definition from: " New Historicism ." Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation.(20 July 2023)

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New Historicism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 22, 2020 • ( 0 )

In 1982 Stephen Greenblatt edited a special issue of Genre on Renaissance writing, and in his introduction to this volume he claimed that the articles he had solicited were engaged in a joint enterprise, namely, an effort to rethink the ways that early modern texts were situated within the larger spectrum of discourses and practices that organized sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture. This reconsideration had become necessary because many contemporary Renaissance critics had developed misgivings about two sets of assumptions that informed much of the scholarship of previous decades. Unlike the New Critics , Greenblatt and his colleagues were reluctant to consign texts to an autonomous aesthetic realm that dissociated Renaissance writing from other forms of cultural production; and unlike the prewar historicists, they refused to assume that Renaissance texts mirrored, from a safe distance, a unified and coherent world-view that was held by a whole population, or at least by an entire literate class. Rejecting both of these perspectives, Greenblatt announced that a new historicism had appeared in the academy and that it would work from its own set of premises: that Elizabethan and Jacobean society was a site where occasionally antagonistic institutions sponsored a diverse and perhaps even contradictory assortment of beliefs, codes, and customs; that authors who were positioned within this terrain experienced a complex array of subversive and orthodox impulses and registered these complicated attitudes toward authority in their texts; and that critics who wish to understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing must delineate the ways the texts they study were linked to the network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constituted Renaissance culture in its entirety.

In some ways, Greenblatt’s declaration of New Historicism’s existence was a problematic gesture, for while his title quickly garnered considerable prestige for critics working in this area, it also created expectations that the New Historicists could not satisfy. Specifically, the scholars who encountered Greenblatt’s term tended to conceive of New Historicism as a doctrine or movement, and their inference led them to anticipate that Greenblatt and his colleagues would soon articulate a coherent theoretical program and delineate a set of methodological procedures that would govern their interpretive efforts. When the New Historicists failed to produce such position papers, critics began to accuse them of having a disingenuous relation to literary theory. In response to such objections, Greenblatt published an essay entitled “Towards a Poetics of Culture” (1987), which has had a profound impact on the way academics understand the phenomenon of New Historicism today. In this piece, Greenblatt attempted to show, by way of a shrewd juxtaposition Of Jean-François Lyotard ‘s and Fredric Jameson ‘s paradigms for conceptualizing capitalism, that the genera) question they address, namely, how art and society are interrelated, cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance. And since the question both Lyotard and Jameson pose is one that New Historicism also raises, its proponents should see the failure of Marxist and poststructuralist attempts to understand the contradictory character of capitalist aesthetics as a warning against any attempt to convert New Historicism into a doctrine or a method. From Greenblatt’s perspective, New Historicism never was and never should be a theory; it is an array of reading practices that investigate a series of issues that emerge when critics seek to chart the ways texts, in dialectical fashion, both represent a society’s behavior patterns and perpetuate, shape, or alter that culture’s dominant codes.

In part because his argument was so effective, and in part because his colleagues developed similar positions independently, most of the critics working in the field of cultural poetics agree that New Historicism is organized by a series of questions and problems, not by a systematic paradigm for the interpretation of literary works. Louis Montrose, for instance, has described some of these issues at length, and in his essay “The Poetics and Politics of Culture” (1986) he provides a list of concerns shared by New Historicists that agrees with and extends Greenblatt’s commentary. Like Greenblatt, Montrose insists that one aim of New Historicism is to refigure the relationship between texts and the cultural system in which they were produced, and he indicates that as a first step in such an undertaking, critics must problematize or reject both the formalist conception of literature as an autonomous aesthetic order that transcends needs and interests and the reflectionist notion that writing simply mirrors a stable and coherent ideology that is endorsed by all members of a society. Having abandoned these paradigms, the New Historicist, he argues, must explain how texts not only represent culturally constructed forms of knowledge and authority but actually instantiate or reproduce in readers the very practices and codes they embody.

Stephen Greenblatt/Pinterest

Montrose also suggests that if New Historicism calls for a rethinking of the relationship between writing and culture, it also initiates a reconsideration of the ways authors specifically and human agents generally interact with social and linguistic systems. This second New Historicist concern is an extension of the first, for if the idea that every human activity is embedded in a cultural field raises questions about the autonomy of literary texts, it also implies that individuals may be inscribed more fully in a network of social practices than many critics tend to believe. But as Montrose goes on to suggest, the New Historicist hostility toward humanist models of freely functioning subjectivity does not imply that he and his colleagues are social determinists. Instead, Montrose argues that individual agency is constituted by a process he calls “subjectification,” which he describes as follows: on the one hand, culture produces individuals who are endowed with subjectivity and the capacity of agency; on the other, it positions them within social networks and subjects them to cultural codes that ultimately exceed their comprehension and control.

In another section of his essay, Montrose adds a third concern to define New Historicism: to what extent can a literary text offer a genuinely radical critique of authority, or articulate views that threaten political orthodoxy? New Historicists have to confront this issue because they are interested in delineating the full range of social work that writing can perform, but as Montrose suggests, they have not yet arrived at a consensus regarding whether literature can generate effective resistance. On one side, critics such as Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield claim that Renaissance texts contest the dominant religious and political ideologies of their time; on the other, some critics argue that the hegemonic powers of the Tudor and Stuart governments are so great that the state can neutralize all dissident behavior. Although Montrose offers his own distinctive response to the containment- subversion problem, he insists that a willingness to explore the political potential of writing is a distinguishing mark of New Historicism.

A final problem Montrose expects his New Historicist colleagues to engage might be called “the question of theory.” Even as he insists that cultural poetics is not itself a systematic paradigm for producing knowledge, he argues that the New Historicists must be well versed in literary and social theory and be prepared to deploy various modes of analysis in their study of writing and culture. Montrose finds notions of textuality from d e c o n s t r u c t io n and poststructuralism to be particularly useful for the practice of historical criticism, for their emphasis on the discursive character of all experience and their position that every human act is embedded in an arbitrary system of signification that social agents use to make sense of their world allow him and his colleagues to think of events from the past as texts that must be deciphered. In fact, these poststructuralist theories often underlie the cryptically chiastic formulations, such as “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history,” that appeal so much to the practitioners of cultural poetics. Other New Historicists invoke different interpretive perspectives, especially those found in the writings of Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz , to aid their interpretive endeavors. The crucial point here is that virtually every New Historicist finds theory to be a potential ally.

Such, then, are the issues that shape the terrain of New Historicism. In what remains, I will comment in some detail upon the writings of three exemplary New Historicists, Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Goldberg, and Walter Benn Michaels. As a result, many significant contributors to this field will go undiscussed, but it is especially important to gain a sense of how these practitioners of cultural poetics actually interpret texts.

New Historicism: A Brief Note

In his introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt indicates that his book aims to chart the ways identity was constituted in sixteenth-century English culture. He argues that the scene in which his authors lived was controlled by a variety of authorities— institutions such as the church, court, family, and colonial administration, as well as agencies such as God or a sacred book—and that these powers came into conflict because they endorsed competing patterns for organizing social experience. From Greenblatt’s New Historicist perspective, the rival codes and practices that these authorities sponsored were cultural constructions, collective fictions that communities created to regulate behavior and make sense of their world; however, the powers themselves tended to view their customs as natural imperatives, and they sought to represent their enemies as aliens or demonic parodists of genuine order. Because human agents were constituted as selves at the moment they submitted to one of these cultural authorities, their behavior was shaped by the codes that were sponsored by the institution with which they identified, and they learned to fear or hate the Other that threatened their very existence.

Since authors were fully situated within this cultural system, Greenblatt contends that their writings both comment generally upon the political struggles that emerged within the Tudor state and register their complicated encounters with authorities and aliens. To prove his thesis, he analyzes self-fashioning in a number of significant Renaissance works, and he shows that these texts record sophisticated responses to a series of cultural problems. Greenblatt demonstrates that Thomas More’s late writings are the culmination of his engagement with theological controversy, for these letters reiterate his sense that his identity is shaped by his participation in the Catholic community, and they restate his belief that Protestant theology is an alien threat that should be rooted out of England. Edmund Spenser’s Bower of Bliss scene in The Faerie Queene encodes and relieves anxieties about the ways sexuality challenges the state’s legitimate authority, and Thomas Wyatt’ssatires explore whether an aristocrat can detach himself from a court society that has become wholly corrupt.

By consistently situating the texts he studies in relation to sixteenth-century political problems, Greenblatt avoids the formalist error of consigning writing to an autonomous aesthetic realm and produces analyses that accord with the New Historicist premise that critics can understand Renaissance works only by linking them to the network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constituted Tudor culture in its entirety. And if one of the aims of cultural poetics is to explain how texts are both socially produced and socially productive, Greenblatt addresses this question directly in his chapter on William Tyndale. He argues there that the invention of the printing press converted books into a form of power that could control, guide, and discipline, and he proves that texts fashioned acceptable versions of the self by narrating the story of James Bainham, that ultimate creation of the written word. Following John Foxe, Greenblatt recounts that when Bainham publicly declared his Protestant faith, he spoke with “the New Testament in his hand in English and the Obedience of a Christian Man in his bosom,” and since the “Obedience” is the title of one of Tyndale’s most influential moral tracts, Greenblatt concludes that Bainham’s identity has been constituted by a text.

Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism

While Greenblatt’s book distinctly advances the New Historicist project of rethinking the relationship between literature and society, it also investigates the other questions that Montrose uses to define cultural poetics. Since self-fashioning is a close analogue to Montrose’s own idea of subjectification, it is clear that much of Greenblatt’s attention is focused on the social processes by which identity is constituted. In his chapter on Christopher Marlowe’s plays, Greenblatt also offers his views on the question whether literature can generate effective resistance, and he concludes that the political ideologies and economic practices that both Marlowe and his characters seek to contest are ultimately too powerful to subvert.

Finally, concerning Greenblatt’s response to the question of theory, it seems fair to conclude that at the time he wrote Renaissance Self-Fashioning he had already decided that no single interpretive model could explain the full complexity of the cultural process New Historicism investigates. Although he invokes a vast array of approaches from a considerable number of disciplines, three of his theoretical borrowings are especially significant. Following Geertz, Greenblatt argues that every social action is embedded in a system of public signification, and this premise is responsible for one of the most spectacular features of his reading practice, namely, his ability to trace in seemingly trivial anecdotes the codes, beliefs, and strategies that organize an entire society. If cultural anthropology supplies Greenblatt with the techniques of thick description that he uses to interpret letters from colonial outposts, then Foucault offers him the theory of power that informs much of his work, for as his chapters on More and Tyndale demonstrate, Greenblatt views disciplinary mechanisms such as shaming, surveillance, and confession as productive of Renaissance culture, not as repressive of innate human potential. Lastly, in poststructuralist criticism from the 1970s and 1980s, Greenblatt finds corroboration of his idea that the self is a vulnerable construction, not a fixed and coherent substance, though he deviates somewhat from deconstructive analyses when he argues that culture, rather than language, creates the subject’s instability. Frankly, when considering his ability to forge these potentially contradictory theories into a powerful critical stance, one wonders who is more adept at self-fashioning, he or the writers he discusses.

In his introduction to James I and the Politics of Literature (1983), Jonathan Goldberg commends Greenblatt’s study of the relationship between Renaissance texts and society, and he claims that his book, like Greenblatt’s, will reveal “the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text” (Goldberg, James xv, quoting Greenblatt, Renaissance 5). But unlike Greenblatt, who analyzes the techniques that a number of competing institutions use to discipline behavior, Goldberg tends to focus on the ways political discourses circulate around a single authority, James I. According to Goldberg, James’s Roman rhetoric is filled with contradictions, two of which are especially important. First, while James wishes to maintain the integrity of the royal line from which he descends, he also claims that he is both self-originating and the world’s secret animating force. Second, while James refers to kingship as a kind of performance in which his thoughts are fully revealed, he also characterizes public display as necessarily obfuscating and opaque.

In a characteristically New Historicist manner, Goldberg offers a political interpretation of these inconsistencies, and he then proceeds to demonstrate that artistic productions replicate the structures of royal authority. Goldberg claims that James’s emphasis on self-origination is an effort to mystify his body, to free himself from his dubious family history and to derive his sovereignty from a transcendent and eternal world. This strategy allows the king to claim that all life springs from hisspiritual substance, but it also enables him to argue that he is unaccountable to the social world he governs. While the king used this doctrine of mystery and state secrecy to protect his political power, Renaissance writers appropriated his language to make sense of their own activities and experiences, b e n jo n s o n appeals to the theory of arcana imperii in his masques because he wants them to point beyond themselves to the royal patron who is responsible for their existence. John Donne uses James’s terms to represent the undiagnosable disease that festers within him as an undisclosed policy that governs a newly founded kingdom. If the discourse of the state secret infiltrates the body here, it also pervades the Renaissance conception of the family, for in an astonishing analysis of domestic portraits, Goldberg shows that the father, modeled on royal authority, generates his lineage but remains distant and unaccountable as he dreamily gazes away from his wife and children.

From even this brief summary, we see that Goldberg shares many of the enabling assumptions of Renaissance Self-Fashioning : he senses that all human activity is inevitably inscribed in a system of signification that organizes the ways agents understand their world; he views Renaissance literature as being inextricably related to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century social practices; and he conceives of the self as a culturally constituted entity that is shaped by structures of authority. The above account also hints that Goldberg’s theoretical orientation is heavily Foucauldian, for his description of the ways the body is inscribed within discourse echoes Foucault’s notion that disciplinary mechanisms swarm and produce their subtle effects even in the domains of human experience that seem intensely private and personal.

But how does Goldberg respond to the containmentsubversion problem, which is consistently investigated in New Historicist writing? We can answer this question by briefly summarizing the argument of his chapter “The Theatre of Conscience.” Goldberg here examines the ways Renaissance texts replicate the second contradiction inherent in James’s discourse, and he begins by suggesting that George Chapman’s Bussy D’Amboi s and William Shakespeare’s Henry V both depict characters who gain authority by using performative arts to conceal their plans and desires. But if these works concur with James’s sense that power can only be maintained through opaque self-dramatization, other texts invoke the royal rhetoric of obfuscating theatricality to challenge the king’s policies. Writers such as Jonson and Donne confidently satirize the tolerated licentiousness of James’s court because they recognize that if the monarch is aloof, unknowable, and unaccountable, then poets can never say anything that intentionally questions royal motives. And if the censor or the king himself raises doubts about an author’s loyalty, that writer can always cloak himself in the language of regal inscrutability and claim that his works, like James’s acts, were constantly being misread. Goldberg’s point, then, is that subversive behavior emerges from within absolutist discourse itself, and he implies that while such a structure allows writers to express feelings of disgust and contempt, it also ultimately contains the threat posed by gestures of dissent and rebellion.

New Historicism’s Deviation from Old Historicism

Goldberg’s work has helped to convince many Renaissance scholars that they should become practitioners of cultural poetics, and as a result New Historicism thrives in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English criticism. Since academics who work in other areas of literary studies have also found this reading strategy congenial, we should now briefly consider the way one of these figures has used New Historicist assumptions to interpret texts drawn from a later culture. In his introduction to The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987), Walter Benn Michaels states that his aim is to study how American writing is shaped by changes in economic production, distribution, and consumption that occurred after the Civil War, and his thesis is that the literary mode commonly called naturalism participates in and exemplifies a capitalist discursive system that is structured by a series of internal divisions. Each significant element of American economic practice—corporations, money, commodities, and identities— is intrinsically differentiated from itself, and since writing too is a part of this massive political formation, it must also display the logic of contradiction that drives mercantile culture.

Perhaps the chapter that most clearly illustrates Michaels’s powers as a reader is the one from which he borrows his book’s title. There Michaels discusses the late nineteenth-century debates between the goldbugs and the advocates of paper currency, and he shows that the controversy between these groups stems from competing assumptions about the nature of money itself: while the defenders of precious metals sense that the value of gold resides in its innate beauty, their opponents think that gold is only desirable because it is a representation of money. Having delineated these opposing views, Michaels shows that both of these positions are illustrated in Frank Norris’ s McTeague , for the narrative’s two misers are motivated by these contradictory models of wealth. Trina’s hoarding of gold enacts her society’s presumption that metal is the money itself, and her act encodes her culture’s fear that should preciousmetals stop circulating, civilization will be undone. Zerkow’s collecting of junk embodies his world’s recognition that if wealth is an effect of representation, then anything can be converted into money, and his behavior demonstrates that a discrepancy between material and value is the enabling condition of capital. Michaels’s point in producing this analysis is not that either of these theories of wealth is truer than the other but that the tension between them is a constitutive element of the discourse of naturalism and that any literary text produced at this time will display both views toward money.

By demonstrating that the logic of naturalism informs both the gold-standard debate and Norris’s text, Michaels performs the first task expected of the New Historicist, namely, explaining how writing is a part of the culture in which it was produced. In the same chapter, he turns to Norris’s Vandover and the Brute to consider the ways that subjectivity is constructed. By means of an intricate reading operation, he shows that Vandover’s consciousness is deeply divided, for while the character sometimes conceives of his self as an extension of his own animal being, at other times he discovers that his identity is a product of textual representation. But since this split neatly replicates the contradictions inherent in the nineteenth-century understanding of money, Michaels concludes that Vandover’s subjectivity is fully inscribed in the discourse of naturalism. Michaels’s understanding of selfhood shapes his response to the third question that Montrose claims New Historicists should address, for Michaels strongly insists that the socially constituted character of human identity prevents individuals from imagining progressive alternatives to the society in which they live. Indeed, in a particularly memorable passage, he dismisses utopian visions as fantasies of transcendence that have haunted cultural criticism from the time of Jeremiah. Finally, on the question of method, one must acknowledge that Michaels not only borrows from other scholars but actually offers insights that complicate existing theories. Although his use of Foucault’s model of discourse is fairly predictable, his discussion of the ways capitalist practices conform to a structure of internal difference is innovative because, as Brook Thomas has noted, this idea indicates that the poststructuralist dismantling of the autonomous subject may be more complicit with mercantile economic systems than has often been recognized.

While few would deny the brilliance of Greenblatt’s, Goldberg’s, or Michaels’s analyses, some critics have developed misgivings about various aspects of their reading practices. A number of critics have argued that despite the New Historicists’ professed interest in cultural difference, many of them speak of societies as if they were monolithic entities and thereby suppress the fact that in a given political formation different paradigms for organizing economic or aesthetic activity exist simultaneously. Some feminists have claimed that the New Historicists have appropriated their assumptions and interpretive strategies but have not contributed much to the study of gender relations. While it is not yet apparent whether these and other criticisms will lead to the demise of cultural poetics in the foreseeable future, it is clear that the emergence of New Historicism has reminded scholars that they will not be able to understand texts unless they study the links between writing and other social practices, and this contribution alone is an honorable legacy.

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

Bibliography Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987); Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, 1987); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (1983), “The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay,” ELH 49 (1982), “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” Studies in English Literature (1984); Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms, special issue, Genre 15 (1992), “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” Political Shakespeare (ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 1985), Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), “Towards a Poetics of Culture” (Veeser); Richard Helgerson, “The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England,” Representations 16 (1986), Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (1983); Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987); Louis A. Montrose, “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form” ELH 50 (1983), “The Poetics and Politics of Culture” (Veeser), “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,” Helios 7 (1980), “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 2 (1983); Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA ioi (1987); Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (1990); Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (1986); Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991); H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (1989); Don E. Wayne, “Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States,” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, 1987). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Foucault’s Influence on New Historicism

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In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry examines the work of two seminal New Historicists, Stephen Greenblatt and Jerome McGann. The origins of New Historicism in Early Modern literary studies are explored, and New Historicism’s common strategies, preferred evidence, and literary sites are explored. Greenblatt’s reliance on Foucault is juxtaposed with McGann’s use of Bakhtin. The lecture concludes with an extensive consideration of the project of editing of Keats’s poetry in light of New Historicist concerns.

Lecture Chapters

Origins of New Historicism
The New Historicist Method and Foucault
The Reciprocal Relationship Between History and Discourse
The Historian and Subjectivity
Jerome McGann and Bakhtin
McGann on Keats
Tony the Tow Truck Revisited

The New Historicism and Heart of Darkness

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Joseph Conrad

Part of the book series: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism ((CSICC))

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The title of Brook Thomas’s The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991) is telling. Whenever an emergent theory, movement, method, approach, or group gets labeled with the adjective “new,” trouble is bound to ensue, for what is new today is either established, old, or forgotten tomorrow. Few of you will have heard of the band called “The New Kids on the Block.” New Age book shops and jewelry may seem “old hat” by the time this introduction is published. The New Criticism, or formalism, is just about the oldest approach to literature and literary study currently being practiced. The new historicism, by contrast, is not as old-fashioned as formalism, but it is hardly new, either. The term “new” eventually and inevitably requires some explanation. In the case of the new historicism, the best explanation is historical.

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The New Historicism: A Selected Bibliography

The new historicism: further reading.

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Cultural Studies vs. the New Historicism.” English Studies/Cultural Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent. Ed. Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. 43–58.

Google Scholar

Cox, Jeffrey N., and Larry J. Reynolds, eds. New Historical Literary Study . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader.” American Literature 63 (1991): 601–22.

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Howard, Jean. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13–43.

Lindenberger, Herbert. The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions . New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

—. “Toward a New History in Literary Study.” Profession: Selected Articles from the Bulletins of the Association of Departments of English and the Association of the Departments of Foreign Languages . New York: MLA, 1984. 16–23.

Liu, Alan. “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism.” English Literary History 56 (1989): 721–71.

McGann, Jerome. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory . Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1985.

—. Historical Studies and Literary Criticism . Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985. See especially the introduction and the essays in the following sections: “Historical Methods and Literary Interpretations” and “Biographical Contexts and the Critical Object.”

Montrose, Louis Adrian. “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History.” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 5–12.

Morris, Wesley. Toward a New Historicism . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

New Literary History 21 (1990). “History and …” (special issue). See especially the essays by Carolyn Porter, Rena Fraden, Clifford Geertz, and Renato Rosaldo.

Representations. This quarterly journal, printed by the University of California Press, regularly publishes new historicist studies and cultural criticism.

Thomas, Brook. “The Historical Necessity for — and Difficulties with — New Historical Analysis in Introductory Courses.” College English 49 (1987): 509–22.

—. The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

—. “The New Literary Historicism.” A Companion to American Thought . Ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Klappenberg. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

—. “Walter Benn Michaels and the New Historicism: Where’s the Difference?” Boundary 2 18 (1991): 118–59.

Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism . New York: Routledge, 1989. See especially Veeser’s introduction, Louis Montrose’s “Professing the Renaissance,” Catherine Gallagher’s “Marxism and the New Historicism,” and Frank Lentricchia’s “Foucault’s Legacy: A New Historicism?”

Wayne, Don E. “Power, Politics and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology . Ed. Jean Howard and Marion O’Connor. New York: Methuen, 1987. 47–67.

Winn, James A. “An Old Historian Looks at the New Historicism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 859–70.

The New Historicism: Influential Examples

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America . New York: Roudedge, 1993.

Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America . Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Rower in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries . Brighton, Eng.: Harvester, 1984.

Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism . Manchester, Eng.: Manchester UP, 1985. This volume occupies the borderline between new historicist and cultural criticism. See especially the essays by Dollimore, Greenblatt, and Tennenhouse.

Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Greenblatt, Stephen J. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture . New York: Roudedge, 1990.

—. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

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—. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. See chapter 1 and the chapter on Othello tided “The Improvisation of Power.”

—. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England . Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. See especially “The Circulation of Social Energy” and “Invisible Bullets.”

Liu, Alan. Wordsworth, the Sense of History . Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.

Marcus, Leah. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents . Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century . Berkeley: U of California P, 1987.

Montrose, Louis Adrian. “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture.” Representations 2 (1983): 61–94. One of the most influential early new historicist essays.

Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance . Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.

Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain . Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres . New York: Methuen, 1986.

Foucault and His Influence

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge . Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper, 1972.

—. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . 1975. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

—. The History of Sexuality , Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

—. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice . Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

—. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences . New York: Vintage, 1973.

—. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Trans. Alan Sheridan et al. New York: Routledge, 1988.

—. Power/Knowledge . Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

—. Technologies of the Self. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988.

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Sheridan, Alan. Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth . New York: Tavistock, 1980.

Smart, Barry. Michel Foucault . New York: Ellis Horwood and Tavistock, 1985.

Other Writers and Works of Interest to New Historicist Critics

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Bakhtin wrote many influential studies on subjects as varied as Dostoyevsky, Rabelais, and formalist criticism. But this book, in part due to Holquist’s helpful introduction, is probably the best place to begin reading Bakhtin.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. Illuminations . Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968.

Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Works of Diderot . Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures . New York: Basic, 1973.

—. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis . New York: Harper, 1974.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past. Trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge: MIT P, 1985.

Said, Edward. Orientalism . New York: Columbia UP, 1978.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure . Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West . New York: Routledge, 1990.

New Historicist (and Recent Historical) Approaches to Heart of Darkness

Brantlinger, Patrick. “ Heart of Darkness : Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?” Criticism 27 (1985): 363–85.

Glenn, Ian. “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Sociological Reading.” Literature and History 13 (1987): 238–56.

Hawkins, Hunt. “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism.” Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties . University: U of Alabama P, 1985.

—. “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Politics and History.” Conradiana 24 (1992): 207–17.

—. “Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Movement.” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981–82): 65–80.

Humphries, Reynold. “The Discourse of Colonialism: Its Meaning and Relevance for Conrad’s Fiction.” Conradiana 21 (1989): 107–33.

Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism . London: Macmillan, 1983.

Works Cited

Bann, Stephen. The Clothing of Clio. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Iggers, George G. The German Conception of History. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1968.

Kosellek, Reinhart. Futures Past . Trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge: MIT P, 1985.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance . New York: Oxford UP, 1941.

Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963.

—. Poets of Reality . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.

Pearson, Charles H. National Life and Character: A Forecast . London: Macmillan, 1893.

Bann, Stephen. The Clothing of Clio . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Iggers, George G. The German Conception of History . Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1968.

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Conrad, J. (1996). The New Historicism and Heart of Darkness . In: Murfin, R.C. (eds) Heart of Darkness. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05227-8_7

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New Historicist Criticism is

a research method , a type of textual research , that literary critics use to interpret texts
a genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts.

Key Terms: Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Semiotics ; Text & Intertextuality ; Tone

American critic Stephen Greenblatt coined the term “New Historicism” (5) in the Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1982). New Historicism, or Cultural Materialism, considers a literary work within the context of the author’s historical milieu. A key premise of New Historicism is that art and literature are integrated into the material practices of culture. Consequently, literary and non-literary texts circulate together in society. Analyzing a text alongside its historical milieu and relevant documents can demonstrate how a text addresses the social or political concerns of its time period.

New Historicism, or Cultural Materialism, considers a literary work within the context of the author’s historical milieu. A key premise of New Historicism is that art and literature are integrated into the material practices of culture; consequently, literary and non-literary texts circulate together in society. New Historicism may focus on the life of the author; the social, economic, and political circumstances (and non-literary works) of that era; as well as the cultural events of the author’s historical milieu. The cultural events with which a work correlates may be big (social and cultural) or small. Scholars view Raymond Williams as a major figure in the development of Cultural Materialism. American critic Stephen Greenblatt coined the term “New Historicism” (5) in the Introduction of one of his collections of essays about English Renaissance Drama, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance . Many New Historicist critics have studied Shakespeare’s The Tempest alongside The Bermuda Pamphlets and various travel narratives from the early modern era, speculating about how England’s colonial expeditions in the New World may have influenced Shakespeare’s decision to set The Tempest on an island near Bermuda. Some critics also situate The Tempest during the period of time during in which King James I ruled England and advocated the absolute authority of Kings in both political and spiritual matters. Since Prospero maintains complete authority on the island on which The Tempest is set, some New Historicist critics find a parallel between King James I and Prospero in The Tempest . Additionally, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe can be interpreted in light of the true story of a shipwrecked man named Alexander Selkirk. Analyzing a text alongside its historical milieu and relevant documents can demonstrate how a text addresses the social or political concerns of its time period.

Foundational Questions of New Historicist Criticism

Does the text address the political or social concerns of its time period? If so, what issues does the text examine?
What historical events or controversies does the text overtly address or allude to? Does the text comment on those events?
What types of historical documents (e.g., wills, laws, religious tracts, narratives, art, etc.) might illuminate the meaning and the purpose of the literary text?
How does the text relate to other literary texts of the same time period?

Online Example: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: A New Historicist Reading

Discussion Questions and Activities: New Historical/Cultural Materialist Criticism

Identify and define key words that you would consider when approaching a text from a new historical/cultural materialist position.
Discuss the significance of the fact that art and literature are integrated into the material practices of culture.
Employ a New Historicist approach to demonstrate how a specific literary text addresses a social topic of its historical milieu.
Using the Folger Digital Texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library , examine act one, scene two, lines 385-450 of The Tempest . What political concerns, social controversies, or historical events of this time period do you think The Tempest treats?
What research would you conduct to argue whether or not The Tempest addresses either slavery or colonialism? Support your viewpoint with a few examples of sources that you would explore and include in a research paper about the topic.

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10.7: New Historicism

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Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
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The Relationship Between History and Literature

Early scholars of literature thought of history as a progression: events and ideas built on each other in a linear and causal way. History, consequently, could be understood objectively, as a series of dates, people, facts, and events. Once known, history became a static entity. We can see this in the previous example from Wonderland . The Mouse notes that the "driest thing" he knows is that "William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria—" I think we would all agree to moan "Ugh!" In other words, the Mouse sees history as a list of great dead people that must be remembered and recited, a list that refers only to the so-called great events of history: battles, rebellions, and the rise and fall of leaders. Corresponding to this view, literature was thought to directly or indirectly mirror historical reality. Scholars believed that history shaped literature, but literature didn't shape history.

While this view of history as a static amalgamation of facts is still considered important, other scholars in the movement called New Historicism see the relationship between history and literature quite differently. Today, most literary scholars think of history as a dynamic interplay of cultural, economic, artistic, religious, political, and social forces. They don't necessarily concentrate solely on kings and nobles, or battles and coronations. In addition, they also focus on the smaller details of history, including the plight of the common person, popular songs and art, periodicals and advertisements — and, of course, literature. New Historical scholarship, it follows, is interdisciplinary , drawing on materials from a number of academic fields that were once thought to be separate or distinct from one another: history, religious studies, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and even the natural sciences. In fact, New Historicism is also called cultural materialism since a text—whether it’s a piece of literature, a religious tract, a political polemic, or a scientific discovery—is seen as an artifact of history, a material entity that reflects larger cultural issues.

Exercise 10.7.1

How have you learned to connect literature and history? Jot down two or three examples from previous classes.

History Influences Literature

Sometimes it's obvious the way history can help us understand a piece of literature. When reading William Butler Yeats’s poem “ Easter, 1916 ,” for instance, readers immediately wonder how the date named in the poem's title shapes the poem's meaning. Curious readers might quickly look up that Easter date and discover that leaders of the Irish independence movement staged a short-lived revolt against British rule during Easter week in 1916. The rebellion was quickly ended by British forces, and the rebel leaders were tried and executed. Those curious readers might then understand the allusions that Yeats makes to each of the executed Irish leaders in his poem and gain a better sense of what Yeats hopes to convey about Ireland's past and future through his poem's symbols and language. Many writers, like Yeats, use their art to directly address social, political, military, or economic debates in their cultures. These writers enter into the social discourse of their time, this discourse being formed by the cultural conditions that define the age. Furthermore, this discourse reflects the ideology of the society at the time, which is the collective ideas—including political, economic, and religious ideas—that guide the way a culture views and talks about itself. This cultural ideology, in turn, reflects the power structures that control—or attempt to control—the discourse of a society and often control the way literature is published, read, and interpreted. Literature, then, as a societal discourse comments on and is influenced by the other cultural discourses, which reflect or resist the ideology that is based on the power structures of society.

Literature Influences History

Let's turn to another example to illuminate these issues. One of the most influential books in American history was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which Stowe wrote to protest slavery in the South before the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin was an instant bestseller that did much to popularize the abolitionist movement in the northern United States. Legend has it that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he greeted her by saying, "So you're the little woman that wrote the book that started this great war." In the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin , then, it's clear that understanding the histories of slavery, abolitionism, and antebellum regional tensions can help us make sense of Stowe's novel.

But history informs literature in less direct ways, as well. In fact, many literary scholars—in particular, New Historical scholars—would insist that every work of literature, whether it explicitly mentions a historical event or not, is shaped by the moment of its composition (and that works of literature shape their moment of composition in turn). The American history of the Vietnam war is a great example, for we continue to interpret and revise that history, and literature (including memoirs) is a key material product that influences that revision: think of Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977); Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (1977); Bobbie Anne Mason's In Country (1985); Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990); Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992); and, most recently, Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn (2010) (Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1977); Philip Carputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine, 1977); Bobbie Anne Mason, In Country (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Mariner, 2009); Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories (New York: Holt, 1992); Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2010)).

Exercise 10.7.2

Pick something you've read or watched recently. It doesn't matter what you choose: Dear White People , the Harry Potter series, Twilight , The Hunger Games , even Jersey Shore or American Idol . Now reflect on what that book, movie, or television show tells you about your culture. What discourses or ideologies (values, priorities, concerns) does your cultural artifact reveal? Jot down your thoughts.

New Historicism Practice

As you can see, authors influence their cultures and they, in turn, are influenced by the social, political, military, and economic concerns of their cultures. To review the connection between literature and history, let's look at one final example, " London ", written by the poet William Blake in 1794.

Illustration by William Blake for "London" from his Songs of Innocence and Experience showing poem and image of a poem with men walking above it

Illustration by William Blake for "London" from his Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794).

Unlike Yeats or Stowe, Blake does not refer directly to specific events or people from the late eighteenth century. Yet this poem directly confronts many of the most pressing social issues of Blake's day. The first stanza, for example, refers to the "charter'd streets" and "charter'd Thames." If we look up the meaning of the word "charter," we find that the word has several meanings. " Charter " can refer to a deed or a contract. When Blake refers to "charter'd" streets, he might be alluding to the growing importance of London as a center of industry and commerce. A "charter" also defines boundaries and control. When Blake refers to "charter'd Thames," then, he implies that nature—the Thames is the river that runs through London—has been constricted by modern society. If you look through the rest of the poem, you can see many other historical issues that a scholar might be interested in exploring: the plight of child laborers ("the Chimney-sweepers cry"); the role of the Church ("Every black'ning Church"), the monarchy ("down Palace walls"), or the military ("the hapless Soldiers sigh") in English society; or even the problem of sexually transmitted disease ("blights with plagues the Marriage hearse"). You will also notice that Blake provided an etching for this poem and the poems that compose The Songs of Innocence (1789) and The Songs of Experience (in which "London" was published), so Blake is also engaging in the artistic movement of his day and the very production of bookmaking itself. And we would be remiss if we did not mention that Blake wrote these poems during the French Revolution (1789–99), where he initially hoped that the revolution would bring freedom to all individuals but soon recognized the brutality of the movement. That's a lot to ask of a sixteen-line poem! But each of these topics is ripe for further investigation that might lead to an engaging critical paper.

When scholars dig into one historical aspect of a literary work, we call that process parallel reading . Parallel reading involves examining the literary text in light of other contemporary texts: newspaper articles, religious pamphlets, economic reports, political documents, and so on. These different types of texts, considered equally, help scholars construct a richer understanding of history. Scholars learn not only what happened but also how people understood what happened. By reading historical and literary texts in parallel, scholars create, to use a phrase from anthropology, a thick description that centers the literary text as both a product and a contributor to its historical moment. A story might respond to a particular historical reality, for example, and then the story might help shape society’s attitude toward that reality, as Uncle Tom's Cabin sparked a national movement to abolish slavery in the United States.

Apply New Historicism To Your Reading

When reading a work through a New Historicism reading, apply the following steps:

Determine the time and place, or historical context of the literature.
Choose a specific aspect of the text you feel would be illuminated by learning more about the history of the text.
Research the history.
Analyze the ways in which the text may be influenced by its history or the text may have influenced the culture of the time.

Apply New Historicism To Your Writing

To review, New Historicism provides us with a particular lens to use when we read and interpret works of literature. Such reading and interpreting, however, never happens after just a first reading; in fact, all critics reread works multiple times before venturing an interpretation. You can see, then, the connection between reading and writing: as Chapter 1 indicates, writers create multiple drafts before settling for a finished product. The writing process, in turn, is dependent on the multiple rereadings you have performed to gather evidence for your essay. It's important that you integrate the reading and writing process together. As a model, use the following ten-step plan as you write using a new historical approach:

Carefully read the work you will analyze.
Formulate a general question after your initial reading that identifies a problem—a tension—related to a historical or cultural issue.
Reread the work , paying particular attention to the question you posed. Take notes, which should be focused on your central question. Write an exploratory journal entry or blog post that allows you to play with ideas.
What does the work mean?
How does the work demonstrate the theme you've identified using a new historical approach?
"So what" is significant about the work? That is, why is it important for you to write about this work? What will readers learn from reading your interpretation? How does the theory you apply illuminate the work's meaning?
Reread the text to gather textual evidence for support.
Construct an informal outline that demonstrates how you will support your interpretation.
Write a first draft.
Receive feedback from peers and your instructor via peer review and conferencing with your instructor (if possible).
Revise the paper , which will include revising your original thesis statement and restructuring your paper to best support the thesis. Note: You probably will revise many times, so it is important to receive feedback at every draft stage if possible.
Edit and proofread for correctness, clarity, and style.

We recommend that you follow this process for every paper that you write from this textbook. Of course, these steps can be modified to fit your writing process, but the plan does ensure that you will engage in a thorough reading of the text as you work through the writing process, which demands that you allow plenty of time for reading, reflecting, writing, reviewing, and revising.

For more strategies, read on here .

Contributors and Attributions

Adapted from "New Historical Criticism: An Overview" from Creating Literary Analysis by Ryan Cordell and John Pennington, licensed CC BY NC-SA 4.0

What’s trending in new historical writing? Four perspectives from the Bibliography of British and Irish History

Jul 28, 2020 | Bibliography of British and Irish History , Features & Articles

The Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) is a record of nearly 620,000 books, articles and essays relating to the British and Irish past, worldwide. The Bibliography is updated three times a year, with the latest update (June 2020) adding records of 4288 new publications — the majority of which cover titles published in 2019-20.

In a previous post we explored the geographical range of the June 2020 update. Here, the BBIH editors explore the range of topics and subjects covered in the new update. We start by surveying the top 10 index terms that have been used in the latest update – giving us a sense of the major themes on which people are currently writing.

We then offer four perspectives on new titles that caught the attention of BBIH editors this time: on the ‘animal turn’ in history, on medieval religious women, on biography, and on new histories of celebrity.

‘Literature’ is by far the most popular subject term from the 4288 new records added to the Bibliography in June 2020. This isn’t perhaps surprising as ‘literature’ in BBIH includes all forms of literature such as medical and religious works, as well as popular literature, poetry, and medieval romances. It also indicates the increasing interdisciplinarity of history and literature studies that we see as we survey recent publishing trends. Examples here include From terror to terrorism in Bleak House: Writing the event, representing the people and Romanticism and the letter .

Similarly the index term ‘Women’ includes a range of nested terms including queenship, motherhood, women’s costume, female religious houses etc. Both world wars feature in the top ten with World War I in the lead, most likely as a result of ongoing publications to mark the centenary of the 1914-18 war.

Alongside this numerical approach, we can also consider the June 2020 update in terms of themes and academic innovation. What topics and approaches catch the eye, and what are some of the emerging trends in recent History publishing? Here are four subjects to emerge from the latest update covering new books, articles and chapters in British and Irish History, published between 2018 and 2020.

The ‘animal turn’ in BBIH, by Roey Sweet

What is the connection between the Book of Job and the sex life of elephants? The answer, as Avi Lifschitz shows, lies in an eighteenth-century dispute over pachyderms’ procreation in which the competing authority of biblical scholarship and natural history were brought to bear. Lifschitz’s article is probably the most eye-catching of the 60 items in the June 2020 update relating to ‘animals’, publications that range from popular attitudes to cranes in medieval Wales to the employment of military and civil defence dogs in the second world war.

It is the horse, however, that receives the most academic attention, reflecting the historical centrality of the equine / human relations to western civilisation: six items come from The horse in premodern European culture but horses feature prominently in another eight items ranging from histories of polo; media representations of the death of Emily Wilding Davison (killed by falling under the race horse Anmer), horse-racing at Newmarket as a site of political intrigue; the fate of Shergar; horses (and mules) in military service; the burial of an Irish cavalry horse; and horses as a means of transportation in the early modern period.

This growing momentum behind the ‘animal turn’ is evident in the number of edited and companion volumes (always a sure sign that a sub-field has been established) that feature in the June update, including five essays from the Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History and essays from Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture and Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains . Other titles, such as Murdering animals: writings on theriocide, homicide and nonspeciesist criminology , challenge the distinction between ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ and the underlying ‘specisism’ inherent in such terminology: perhaps the Bibliography’s indexing term ‘animals’ should be replaced by ‘non-human animals’.

‘Female religious orders and houses’, by Sara Charles

Given my research interests, one of my most used search terms in the BBIH is ‘Female religious orders and houses’, which currently lists 1085 publications. The graph below gives a distribution of these titles over area and time period (in England).

It’s interesting that this subject term has so many resources relating to other countries, possibly as a result of medieval religious networks, nuns moving to the Continent after the Reformation, and also through their missionary work. As the second graph shows, in England titles relating to the medieval and early modern are dominate, which is perhaps unsurprising in the pre- and immediately post-Reformation world. Using BBIH like this—to get a breakdown of published material—really helps me to visualise patterns in research fields, while asking questions of the results allows me to delve down deeper.

Particular highlights from the June 2020 update include Gender in medieval places, spaces and thresholds , a collective volume of essays which came from the 2017 Gender and Medieval Studies conference. In February 2020 we added a new ‘types of publication’ search to BBIH. This allows me to select titles that are just monographs, just articles, just book chapters and so on. In my field this search reveals previously hidden research such as theses, including ‘The Nunneries of London and its Environs 1100–1400’, by Janet Mary Jones. Further afield, we have examples such as The Brigidine sisters in Ireland, America, Australia and New Zealand, 1807–1922 by Ann Power, and ‘ Forgetting Apartheid: History, culture and the body of a nun’ an article by Leslie Bank.

Searching through BBIH results also makes it easy to identify particular trends in publishing, for example, the subject of education with Caroline Bowden’s Convent schooling for English girls in the ‘exile’ period, 1600–1800 and a recent flurry of articles about Nano Nagle, the founder of Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was a pioneer of female education in Ireland.

‘Biography’, by Philip Carter

Ten per cent of new BBIH records added in June 2020 are indexed with reference to forms of historical life writing (‘biography’, ‘autobiography’, ‘memoir’ etc.) or to the sources (‘letters’, ‘correspondence’, ‘diary’) on which historical biographers draw. Biography as a route to the past is in robust health, and there are few chronologies, subject areas or regions to which life writing won’t take you: from the blind Irish harper Turlough Carolan (1670-1738) to Mary Barkas (1889-1959) —a forgotten pioneer of Antipodean psychoanalysis, to Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972). Like no other genre, biography also reveals the current range and richness of historical research and publishing.

Among the latest additions to BBIH there are, of course, new works on familiar faces, including Austen, Dickens, Wittgenstein and Chaucer, in Marion Turner’s Wolfson Prize shortlisted study of ‘A European life’ . In each case, new takes on household names emerge from the major academic presses. But the bulk of BBIH’s new biographical content is the work of much smaller publishers—often with an intensely regional focus, as with the Stories of the Men on the Bo’ness War Memorial (Bo’ness Town Trust Association, 2019) or Ordinary Women in Extraordinary Times: eleven Cork women in the revolutionary years, 1916-1923 , from the Shandon History Group. In addition to its use by local historians, biography is also the approach of choice for many historians of the military, sporting life and popular entertainment.

The new BBIH update also reveals a taste for more episodic and perhaps experimental forms of historical biography. Family and group lives remain popular, with no network as popular as Dr Johnson and his circles, not least in Leo Damrosch’s collective biography, The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends who Shaped an Age . Others employ a biographical approach despite the partiality of sources—as in Sarah Watling’s 2019 Noble savages. The Olivier Sisters: four lives in seven fragments —while interest in object biography continues with Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: the biography of George Orwell’s 1984 .

Pulling out from ‘traditional’ biography to more person-centred histories leads to some innovative and exciting research, especially in the early modern period. Read across the grain, and set in their wider context, letters, diaries and personal tokens are central to new studies such as Fiona McCall’s ‘ Women’s experience of violence and suffering as represented in loyalist accounts of the English Civil War ’, Elaine Chalus’s ‘ Coping with separation during the Napoleonic Wars (the Fremantle papers, 1800–14) ’ and Sally Holloway’s The game of love in Georgian England: Courtship, emotions, and material culture . Here the ego-documents that remain central to traditional biography prompt new histories of emotion, or—in Karen Harvey’s ‘Epochs of embodiment’ —fresh perspectives on human physicality shaped less by gender than by relationships and age.

‘Celebrity’, by Simon Baker

Many moons ago it was suggested that the IHR hold a conference on celebrity as a historical concept. At that time the idea was dismissed as being a little too fanciful. A little later the journal Celebrity Studies emerged focusing on ‘the critical exploration of celebrity, stardom and fame. It seeks to make sense of celebrity by drawing upon a range of (inter)disciplinary approaches, media forms, historical periods and national contexts.’ In 2016 a conference was held looking at celebrity culture from the eighteenth century to the Victorian period and the International Celebrity Studies conference is now in its fifth year. Indeed, a review of A Short History of Celebrity describes this as ‘a hot academic topic’.

The subject term ‘Celebrity’ was added to BBIH in 2010. But what, historically speaking, is celebrity, fame or stardom?—terms all too often used for Hollywood actors, sports personalities and reality TV stars. Long before film, celebrity was being observed in the acting careers of the eighteenth-century actors David Garrick (see David Garrick and the mediation of celebrity ) and Sarah Siddons, as in the recent ‘ Sarah Siddons, sensibility and enthusiastic devotion in the British Enlightenment ‘.

David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity

Well before celebrity magazines like Hello and Heat , the eighteenth century had its own periodicals (now discussed in Magazine miniatures: Portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens in late eighteenth-century periodicals ) while the Victorian equivalents are considered in ‘ “Peeps,” or “Smatter and chatter”: Late-Victorian artists presented as Strand celebrities ‘.

The June 2020 update suggests both that ‘Celebrity’ is now an established historical topic and one that’s developing to offer more nuanced perspectives on the past. Yes, Sarah Siddons still appears as a subject but she’s now set against studies of, for example, the Georgian Methodist preacher George Whitefield in ‘ Fandom: Enthusiastic devotion, religious and theatrical celebrity’ For the same period we also have ‘” Weighty celebrity”: corpulency, monstrosity, and freakery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England ‘, which considers the popular status of Edward Bright and Daniel Lambert. The latter article includes another favourite index term– ‘Body, attitudes to’–but that’s a whole new blog.

About the Bibliography of British and Irish History

The Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) is the largest and most comprehensive guide available to what’s been written about British and Irish history, from the early 1900s to 2020.

It’s an essential resource for research and teaching, providing up-to-date information (and links) on nearly 620,000 History books, articles, chapters, edited collections and theses .

New records are added in three annual updates . These records are searchable by a wide range of facets including: title, author, chronology, date and form of publication, historical topic and geographical region.

The Bibliography is a research project of the UK’s Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society , and is published by Brepols. BBIH is a subscription service and is available remotely via university and research libraries worldwide.

Roey Sweet is Academic Director of BBIH and Professor of Urban History at Leicester University
Sara Charles is Assistant Editor of the Bibliography of British and Irish History at the IHR
Philip Carter is Head of Digital and Publishing at the IHR
Simon Baker is Editor of BBIH at the IHR

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Ranahar: Textuality of History, Culture and Politics

The question of the relation between the history and the literature is a central question of historicism and new historicism. Literature is not possible without the influence of the time; past or present. The depiction of the past is the picture of history in the text, and the portrayal of present becomes the history in the future, hence the literary text is not free from the history in any way. Furthermore, some tests intentionally present the history, not as exactly as the history, but as the interpretation of the history, hence the mode of new historical way of understanding the text. Yogesh Raj's Ranahar provides the lost history of Malla dynasty, primarily the history of the last Malla king, Ranajit. The book is not a pure imagination, neither is it a pure history, but it has the combination of the historical facts and his imagination. Reading this novel, as a fiction, just as pure imagination is an injustice to the veiled part of its history. With the background of the history of Bhaktapur, this article examines the novel Ranahar from historical and new historical perspective on how literature has become a medium to reveal the lost history, the textuality of history.

Pribumi di Mata Kolonial dalam Kumpulan Cerpen Teh dan Pengkhianat Karya Iksaka Banu

This research aims to discuss social and cultural aspects that are closely related to Indonesian history regarding events of colonialism in the collection of short stories entitled Teh dan Pengkhianat by applying new historicism. This is a descriptive qualitative research. The theory used to analyze the relevance of literary works as social documents is from new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt (1980). Besides, the theory used to investigate colonialist perspectives on indigenous peoples is form orientalism, Edward Said (1935). The results of this research are as follows. First, historical representations are marked by fear, restraint, compulsion, and counterforce of indigenous people in the colonial period before and after 1945. Second, social representation is marked by humanity, preparation, and persistence in dealing with the variola virus that occurred in 1644. Third, cultural representations are marked by the hard work of indigenous people for equal rights in clothing style until transportation. Data that demonstrates hard work is the existence (space, process, and object), identity (matching), and unity/multiplicity (merging) of indigenous peoples and colonialists.

Jihad e Afghan, Historicism, New historicism and "Qalla Jangee" a Novel (A Post Modern Reading)

Rekonstruksi sejarah 1998 dalam perspektif new historicism: kajian atas novel laut bercerita karya leila s. chudori.

Teks sastra sebagai produk sejarah dilandasi oleh peristiwa sejarah yang melatarbelakangi kelahirannya. Novel Laut Bercerita karya Leila S. Chudori menghadirkan peristiwa sejarah 1998. Masalah penelitian adalah kekuasaan negara dalam konstruksi peristiwa reformasi 1998, gerakan mahasiswa sebelum dan sesudah tragedi 1998, dan representasi ekonomi dan budaya sebelum dan sesudah tragedi 1998. Tujuan penelitian adalah untuk mendeskripsikan kekuasaan negara dalam konstruksi peristiwa reformasi 1998, gerakan mahasiswa sebelum dan sesudah tragedi 1998, dan representasi ekonomi dan budaya sebelum dan sesudah tragedi 1998. Pendekatan yang digunakan adalah pendekatan new historicism dengan mengaitkan teks sastra dan nonsastra sebagai upaya untuk mengungkap kekuatan sosial, ekonomi, dan politik yang melingkupi karya sasta. Metode yang digunakan adalah pembacaan secara paralel teks sastra dalam novel dan nonsastra pada peristiwa 1998. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa tragedi 1998 digambarkan melalui kekuasaan negara dengan kepemimpinan yang didukung oleh kekuatan militer secara otoriter dan represif. Jika dilihat dari wacana yang berkembang ketika periode sebelum dan sesudah tragedi 1998, terjadi pertarungan kekuasaan yang memicu gerakan mahasiswa. Sementara itu, pada masa pascareformasi kekuasaan Orde Baru tidak lagi memegang kendali Mahasiswa tidak lagi melakukan perlawanan. Kendali kekuasaan pascareformasi menunjukkan perkembangan ekonomi dan budaya yang makin baik.

Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as the Reflections of the French Revolution: A New Historicist Study

Abstract The current study takes a New Historic outlook toward William Wordsworth’s the “Lucy Poems” and believes that by a minute scrutiny of these poems we can expose the power structure and the dominant discourses that according to New Historicism have shaped the poet’s character, society and world. Accordingly, the paper suggests that the poet through symbolic and non-symbolic ways has embedded historical and political facts in these poems. To do so, the research will reveal some controversial correspondences among these poems, William Wordsworth’s life and historical facts of the French Revolution. To support this idea, the study will bring quotations not only from modern conspicuous literary critics but also from the poets and Romantic contemporaries to show how the historical and political discourses of the period have greatly influenced both William Wordsworth and even the literature of the whole era, i.e., Romanticism. As a matter of fact, this research intends to connect the “Lucy Poems” to the contemporary historical context and the poet’s ideals of the Revolution in France. The findings, however, reveal that William Wordsworth has been submissive to the historical events of his time.

Literature and History: Study of Nigerian Indigenous Historical Novels

The assumption that history posits itself as a fact, while literature is to be taken as an artistic form, only for entertainment (i.e., the difference between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion) has long been debated by formalists and soclologlsts of literature. In Yoruba society, literature and history are important in explaining the fullness of life and the world around us. It is against this background that this paper examines the relationship between literature and history and how Yoruba novelists use their works as vehicles for the representation of history. We adopt the theory of New Historicism to analyze T.A.A. Ladele's lgbi Aye n yi and Olu Owolabi's Ote Nibo. Some of the findings reveal that: both Yoruba literature and history are closely related, they are both based on Yoruba experience and Yoruba existence either in the past or present; while Ladele Interprets the history of the dignity and royal glamour of the Yoruba oba in the precolonial era as a form of domination which is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force; Owolabi represents the hlstory of party politics in Yoruba society as fraudulent, deceltful, full of bitterness and violence. The paper concludes that both novelists are subjective in their representation of Yoruba history, but they successfully establfsh the fact that the novel is a repository of history; however, such history is not a mere chronlcle of facts and events, but rather a complex description of human reality and a challenge to the preconceived notions of the societies from which they emerged.

The Yorùbá Social Values in Ọbasá’s Poetry

Among the social values which equip the Yorùbá person are honesty, transparency, accountability, integrity, justice, fair-play, family sense, hard work, and truthfulness. The basic values of the people determine their behavior and what they direct their energy toward. Yorùbá social values have received serious attention from scholars. However, the ideology that inform the social values have not been given a deserved attention. The main aim of this essay is to investigate the Yorùbá social values in Ọbasá’s poetry texts – Àwọn Akéwì I-III (1924, 1934, and 1945). The objective of the study is to examine the ideology which inform the social values, and which construct power. The paper also analyzes the extent to which the poet engages the ideology as exemplified in his poetry texts. In addition, the essay highlights the relevance of Ọbasá’s works to the contemporary Yorùbá society, and the literary devices employed by the poet to put across his message. The study employs descriptive and analytical methods using a New Historicism theory, which calls for a recovery of the ideology that gave birth to a text. The findings of this study reveal the Yorùbá philosophical thoughts on social values, and Obasa ͎’s interrogation of the phil ́ - osophical thoughts, which revere physical strength, wealth, position, children, 88 Saudat Adébísí O͎láyídé Hamzat & Hezekiah Olúfé͎mi Adeodun and knowledge as power. The study concludes that Ọbasá was a versatile and a thorough-bred poet whose poems call attention to the Yorùbá social values, to deconstruct and redefine power in a way that promote development. The study suggests that Ọbasá’s poems be studied holistically, and recommends that the poems should be reprinted and made available for scholarly work in institutions of learning.

The Dialectics of Political Ideology and Power Relations in African Literature: A Reading of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s Baṣọ̀run Gáà

Introduction Ideology underscores how we make sense of history and reality. It is the underlying theory that governs every organized movement, institution, and government. In Politics, ideology superintends the constructs, subversions, moderations, and resistance of power. In Literature, ideology plays even a deluxe role as it is the vehicle that drives political and cultural purposes. A close consideration of the African creative canvass reveals that her imaginative writings are burdened with the ideology of socio-cultural redemption. Although replete with a recasting of themes that stress the subversions and resistance of political and religious power, especially in the continent’s post-colonial space, there is not much thematic commitment among creative writers to the ideology that constructs and moderates power. Using the New Historicism as the theoretical basis, this paper proposes that to understand the logic that has bedeviled post-colonial African governance, there is need to revisit power structures that characterize the continent’s pre-colonial history. It is in this burden that this paper shall attempt to examine the dialectics of political ideology, power relations and the prophetic in Baṣọrun Gáà ̀. The paper also argues that the private anxieties of the playwright, as presented in the play, 160 Lere Adeyemi are prophetic in nature and that Baṣọrun Gáà is weakened by the burdens of ̀ his strength, in other words, blinded by sight.

NEW MATERIALISM: PROJECTIONS INTO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

The article considers the recent (re)turn to materiality in philosophy and theory, in particular, such schools as speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. They offer rethinking of objects and criticism of anthropocentric worldview. The attention to materiality privileges matter, body, and nature. Theorists of New materialism reject the binary oppositions (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, etc.) and insist on intra-action as a new materialist orientation. The author argues that the new materialist critique of conventional critique will be useful for literary theory and criticism. According to Latour, critique should be productive and collaborative. As far as critical judgments rely on thelogic of representation that in its turn is based on similarity, analogy and opposition they restrict the analytic enterprise. Moreover, it is necessary to rethink conventional practices of interpretation and explanation. In this context, K. Barad proposes to substitute these strategies with the practice of ‘diffraction’. In the second part of the article, the author analyzes Graham Harman’s article The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer:Object-Oriented Literary Criticism. We pay attention to Harman’s critique of New Criticism, New Historicism, and Deconstruction in their contrast to object-oriented philosophy. In his analysis of New Criticism, Harman figures out the taxonomic fallacy within this theory. He argues against the idea that only poetry has all the non-prose sense while other disciplines have the literal sense. His second argument against New Criticism problematizes the unity of all the elementsin a literary work. Harman outlines the assumptions of New Historicism and points out that it turns everything into interrelated influences. Instead, he argues that contextuality is not universal. In his criticism of Deconstruction Harman underlines that Derrida wrongly believes that ontological realism automatically entails an epistemological realism. In his turn, Harman insists that the thing is deeper than its interactions are.

COVID-19 Infodemic: A New Historicist Analysis of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This research intends to explore the current calamitous situation of Covid-19 in the context of Oryx and Crake, mirroring how Covid-19 and Oryx and Crake are linked through the perception of unification and the consciousness of the world as a whole by holding the entire world hostage. It vigorously examines the disease being presented as a weapon of mass destruction, followed by a conspiracy theory, the reality of the present and fancy of the future, generating a feeling of mingled contradiction, a psychological aspect, and stout human response to the unpredicted as some shared themes between the two. The potential strength of the New Historicism was found applicable in contextualizing COVID-19 and Oryx and Crake, which explore and project forward the biotechnological, social, political, cultural, economic, and climatic givens of the pandemic ridden world. It involves a parallel study of a literary work, interpreting events as the products of time. The textual interpretation was based on observation of historical context to see how following pandemics of the past may allow today’s world to detect the fundamental causes of such diseases. Understanding the pandemic through intellectual history highlighted the consequences of unscrupulous exploitation of bio-engineering threats, a sense of uncertainty, fear, and insecurity, biotech corporations, and marketing genetically engineered life forms.

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New Research Sheds Light on the Forgotten 11th-Century Muslim Scientist That Fundamentally Transformed the History of Physics

By University of Sharjah May 18, 2024

Ibn al-Haytham (“Alhasen”) on the left pedestal of reason [while Galileo is on the right pedestal of the senses] as shown on the frontispiece of the Selenographia (Science of the Moon; 1647) of Johannes HeveliusIbn al-Haytham (“Alhasen”) on the left pedestal of reason [while Galileo is on the right pedestal of the senses] as shown on the frontispiece of the Selenographia (Science of the Moon; 1647) of Johannes Hevelius. Credit: Public domain

Their research focuses on the legacy of al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham known in Latin as “Alhazen” and particularly his most influential work titled Book of Optics , reputed in Arabic as Kitab al-Manazir and first circulated in Europe via its Latin translation dubbed ‘ Perspectiva ’. Ibn al-Haytham was born in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 965 during the Abbasid Caliphate.

The divisions IV-V of this authoritative book have been recently translated into English from Arabic and published by the Warburg Institute under the title “ The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books IV–V: On Reflection and Images Seen by Reflection. ” Having already rendered divisions I-III into English, the Warburg Institute is bringing together a wide-ranging network of scientists “for a collaborative humanities-science investigation of [Ibn] al-Haytham and the questions his work provokes.

“The role of Alhazen [Ibn al-Haytham] in these processes is simultaneously well-known, but limited; only half of his scientific works have English translation and a quarter are not yet edited.”

Contributions and Methodology

Introducing the new translation, the Warburg Institute describes Ibn al-Haytham as “perhaps the greatest mathematician and physicist of the medieval Arabic/Islamic world. His reputation is based not only on the vast amount of material he was able to process, but also on his rigorous scientific methodology.

“He (Ibn al-Haytham) deals with both the mathematics of rays of light and the physical aspects of the eye in seven comprehensive books. His reinstatement of the entire science of optics sets the scene for the whole of the subsequent development of the subject … influencing figures such as William of Ockham, Kepler, Descartes, and Christaan Huygens.”

Professor Nader El-Bizri of Sharjah University’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences has just published an academic review of the Warburg Institute’s translation of Ibn al-Haytham. The article, printed in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, highlights the strong influence the Arab-Muslim optical scientist has exerted over the ages up to the present day.

Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics , Prof. El-Bizri writes, “constituted a monumental foundational opus in the history of science and the visual arts from the Middle Ages to the early modern period in the European milieu and the Islamicate context … The reception of Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics in the European milieu took place from the High Middle Ages via Gerard of Cremona’s Toledo circle in terms of its Latinate translations, and subsequent influence on Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit opticians across Europe.

“It influenced François d’Aguilon’s Opticorum libri sex within the Antwerp Jesuit mathematical school and had a direct impact on Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia . The Optics was also consulted by Girard Desargues, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, and Christaan Huygens.”

Ongoing Translations and Impact

Prof. El-Bizri works closely with the Warburg Institute assisting its attempts to reintroduce Ibn al-Haytham to the west. “A remarkable thinker, not only did Ibn al-Haytham revolutionize optical thought by mathematizing its study, [but] his thinking also went on to have similar revolutionary effects in medieval Europe.”

The Warburg Institute is investing in rendering the writings of Ibn al-Haytham on optics into English, which Prof. El-Bizri describes as “voluminous.” “Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics indicates with evidence the impact of Arabic sciences and philosophy on the history of science and the architectural and visual arts in Europe, as well as demonstrating how science and the arts influence each other in the manner the studies of optics in their mathematized physics inspired the invention of projective geometric constructions of perspective as a novel Renaissance method of painting and architectural design.”

Prof. El-Bizri adds “The impact of this book is fundamental not only in the history of science from the High Middle Ages till the early-modern period in Europe, but it was also foundational for architecture and the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance and up till the late Baroque era. Moreover, it has further significance in modern conceptions of the mathematization of physics, the reliance on experimentation in science, and the philosophical analysis of perception.”

Asked about the importance of translating Ibn al-Haytham into English despite the lapse of nearly 1000 years, Prof. El-Bizri says the Arab-Muslim scientist’s theories and methodologies, specifically those dealing with optics are still considered “seminal” in the literature. Ibn al-Haytham has had a “foundational impact on the history of science and the arts in Europe.”

The influence of Ibn al-Haytham’s writings in the European milieu, according to Prof. El-Bizri, cannot be overlooked. The Arab-Muslim scientist had “a notable effect on Biagio Pelacani da Parma’s Questiones super perspectiva communi , Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura , Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentarii , culminating in the first printed Latin version in the publication of Friedrich Risner’s Opticae thesaurus in the sixteenth century.

“Then, in the seventeenth century, it influenced François d’Aguilon’s Opticorum libri sex within the Antwerp Jesuit mathematical school and had a direct impact on Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia .”

In the Book of Optics , notes Prof. El-Bizri, Ibn al-Haytham establishes an “inventive and precise scientific experimental method ( al-iʿtibār al-muḥarrar ) with its controlled verificative repeated testing, as framed by isomorphic compositions between physics and mathematics.”

He adds that Ibn al-Haytham in his Optics “aims at elucidating the nature of visual perception through studies on the anatomy and physiology of the eyes, the optic nerves and the frontal part of the brain, along with cognitive psychology and the analysis of psychosomatic ocular motor kinaesthetic acts.”

Reference: “The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, Books IV–V: On Reflection and Images Seen by Reflection” by Nader El-Bizri, 20 February 2024, International Journal of the Classical Tradition . DOI: 10.1007/s12138-024-00654-4

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3 comments on "new research sheds light on the forgotten 11th-century muslim scientist that fundamentally transformed the history of physics".

It’s amazing what funding from Qatar can accomplish – just look at America’s colleges. A moslem physicist is discovered and paraded around? Does mean we should put 1500 years of death and persecution by lsIam into a memory hole?

I do wish we could dispense with religious identifications.

Headline should say “who,” not “that.”

(Re) Designing the Tree of Robotic Life

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The tree of life forms a concise snapshot of the history, and linkages between, all life forms on Earth. Another way to look at this diagram is to imagine what the world would have been like if history had played out differently. If the evolutionary game was run again, how would the same fundamental building blocks have combined, given different selective pressures and exogenous shocks? This Research Topic is placed at the intersection of evolutionary biology, engineering, and design, and ponders the above question in the context of robotics. Our aim is to challenge existing notions of what robots are, how they are built and controlled, and how they interact with their environments. Papers submitted to this collection should explore scenarios in which the shifting tides of evolutionary history have resulted in a new (robotic) tree of life, and their goal should be to come up with radically new robot concepts suited to this reality. This Research Topic aims to bring together experts across a variety of different fields within robotics (and further reaching) to encourage papers brainstorming new and exciting ideas of how robotics may have developed under different evolutionary paradigms. By challenging pre-existing notions of what robots are, how they are built and controlled, and how they interact with their environments, the Research Topic not only helps to better define the “Phylogenetic Tree of Robotic Life” as it is currently, but also to consider its previously unimagined, “could-have-been” (or, perhaps, “yet-to-be”) branches. In doing so, we are hopeful that this will breed new international collaborations and exciting new research paths which are unique and approach robotics from an alternative (and perhaps unusual) perspective. This Research Topic is linked to the workshop “(RE) DESIGNING THE TREE OF ROBOTIC LIFE: A Game of Alternative Timelines” which will take place at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference in Yokohama, Japan on Monday 13th May. We encourage contributions to the Research Topic from workshop attendees and external relevant contributors. Any paper which was first published as a conference proceedings, must be extended to include 30% original content to be considered.

Keywords : tree of life, robot, evolution, bio-inspired robotics

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Celebrating family firsts and resourcefulness in the Class of 2024

Lynn larabi, crystal marshall, and jason chu all entered penn as first-generation college undergraduates and the children of immigrants and pursued different paths: political science, film, and finance and accounting..

Lynn Larabi recalls that growing up in Northeast Philadelphia some of her earliest school memories involved students at the local library looking over her writing assignments, at her parents’ request. A few years later, her mother—who works at the local elementary school—paid the favor forward by offering Larabi’s help with homework to younger students. Larabi says this emphasized for her the cyclical nature of public service and community involvement.

“I’ve developed a passion for education policy and a passion for workforce development because you really see that spaces like libraries and community centers are needed for families like my own,” she says, in reference to the Free Library of Philadelphia, considering her parents—immigrants from Morocco—faced a language barrier and didn’t attend college. Larabi, a fourth-year student in the College of Arts and Sciences , channeled these passions into a political science major, public service internships, and community engagement.

She also says that observing her father’s experiences as a taxi driver has shaped her views of labor rights. Abderrahim Larabi says he has kept his “Penn Dad” hat in his car for the past four years, and that he’s a lucky dad to have her as his daughter.

“She works hard,” he says, saying she made his dreams of higher education and community impact come true. “In her, I see myself. She is my eyes. What she’s going through, it’s like I am going through.”

Larabi is among the one-in-five members of Class of 2024 who are first-generation college students, according to Penn First Plus . The resource hub uses this term for students whose parents or guardians did not complete a bachelor’s degree.

First-generation students at Penn have a diversity of interests and accomplishments, but from childhood through university they share some attributes and experiences: Resourcefulness in seeking out information, the navigation of unspoken social norms and the implications of generational wealth and, especially in the case of second-generation immigrants, self-imposed pressure to make the most of opportunities their parents provided.

Those in the Class of 2024 navigated all this on top of the unusual experience of beginning college remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re a population that is sprinkled everywhere. We all have different talents, different skills,” says Larabi, who, as president of the First-Generation/Low-Income Dean’s Advisory Board , surveyed students involved in athletics, Greek life, music, and more. “It’s an identity that you honor because it is a triumph to be at an institution like Penn as a first-generation student, and it’s up to us to have a community and have a support system.”

Her resilience as a first-generation student gave her the guts to start a pop-rock band, Menagerie . She says starting it alongside a group of friends has allowed her to show the Penn community that students of a variety of musical backgrounds and experiences can unite under a shared desire to perform and produce music.

Larabi says one of her favorite experiences at Penn has been her involvement in Ase Academy , a mentorship group for Black middle and high school students from West Philadelphia. “I am one of two mentors from Philly who is involved in this program, and that’s important to me because it’s almost like getting a chance to serve as a mirror to versions of my younger self that I didn’t have,” she says.

Larabi says she always believed in public service and the power of policy to enact change. She learned about the importance of local government interning at the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs , saw how to uplift youth as a United Nations Foundation intern, and saw her faith in public service increase serving as a campaign fellow for U.S. Rep. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, also a child of African immigrants.

One of nine Thouron Scholars , Larabi is headed to the University of Oxford to pursue a master’s degree in evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation.

Studying representation in films and festivals

As a communication major with a minor in cinema and media studies, Crystal Marshall says she began to have questions in film classes about who she was watching and why. Taking a course her second year on Black joy—with Chaz Antoine Barracks, an Annenberg School for Communication postdoctoral fellow at the time—provided further direction.

For the final paper for an independent study her third year, supervised by former Annenberg postdoctoral fellow Perry B. Johnson and funded by the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships , Marshall examined the film canon, which she describes as a “subset of films people expect you to see to give yourself a degree of credibility.” Looking at lists from entertainment outlets, she found “there were very few films by women, very few films by women of color, and almost no films by Black women, so that was very concerning to me.”

She says going to the Cannes Film Festival last summer changed her life and she subsequently “went down a film festival rabbit hole,” volunteering at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia and attending the Philadelphia Film Festival. She was co-director for this year’s Bifocal Film Festival, Penn’s first student-led film festival, and is co-president of Monolith Arts Collective, a group dedicated to showcasing the work of Black artists in West Philadelphia.

Marshall, who is a lso a Thouron Scholar , will pursue a master’s degree in film programming and curating at the University of London, Birbek. She says she also hopes to continue screenwriting.

With parents who immigrated from Jamaica and didn’t go to college, Marshall, who is from Miami Gardens, Florida, says it was a big deal when she applied for the Thouron Award. She says being a first-generation student comes with a great deal of self-imposed pressure and she felt a sense of, “What did my parents come to this country for if I wasn’t going to go to college and be successful?”

Expressing his pride, her father, Leroy Marshall says, “she has strength and perseverance and here she is.” Seeing her matriculate, he says, “is remarkable.”

“UPenn was the last letter she got in that mail, and everybody was just screaming; we were jumping, and we were shouting. It was great,” recalls her mother, Claudett Marshall. She says at the time she wondered, “Can Crystal manage by herself? How is it going to work?”

Marshall has been working in the Penn First Plus office since the fall of her second year and says she didn’t realize the expansiveness of the first-generation and limited-income (FGLI) identity until working there. “FGLI is something that’s an applicable term even outside of the college setting because it is a big reality for people entering tight-knit industries like entertainment in particular,” she says, noting the industry is also competitive and full of people whose parents worked in entertainment.

First-generation advocacy and research

Jason Chu says a lot of people in his hometown of Sachse, Texas, never left the state, that there was the precedent of going to the local community college and getting a job in the Dallas area. But Chu says going to accounting competitions in high school and seeing students from other schools made him realize he should start looking outwards.

“When I was a sophomore, a senior at my school had gotten into Penn, and he was the first person who had gotten into an Ivy in a while, so that was kind of a mind-blowing moment,” says Chu, a Wharton School student with concentrations in finance and accounting. He searched for top business schools and says he also realized that Penn had a strong FGLI community with a lot of resources.

Chu, who is headed into investment banking in San Francisco after graduation, became a mentee in Penn First Plus’s Pre-First Year Program, Wharton’s Successful Transition & Empowerment Program , and the PEER Mentoring Program , helping Asian and Pacific-Islander students adjust to life at Penn. He went on to join the Wharton Undergraduate Society of Accounting, Wharton Asia Exchange, and Phi Chi Theta, a business fraternity.

Chu says he is passionate about sharing the first-generation experience and says peers may not understand his experience of working a job every semester—and sometimes multiple jobs—to pay rent and expenses.

Having been on the receiving end of help for a while, he says that once he could give back he sought out first-generation spaces. He became involved with Seven|Eight , a Penn community for first-generation Asian American and Pacific Islander students, and 1vyG, the country’s largest summit for FGLI students. Penn hosted the conference last year.

Chu’s honors thesis focuses on how first-generation students fare in the workplace after graduating. “First-generation students are a very understudied area in academia,” Chu says. “A lot of the research is centered around how these students do transitioning into college and how they do getting a job, but there’s kind of a drop-off in understanding how they do long-term, which was my goal.”

He says of his own experience, “I think being a first-generation student at Penn specifically, at an elite institution, is coming to realize the privilege that a person holds. I think coming to Penn I realized how much more power I have relative to the people I grew up with, and I’m trying to understand the best way to harness that toward helping the same people.”

His father, Minh Chu, says he always encouraged his children to at least get a four-year degree, that it will help them down the line and make looking for a job easier. He and Jason’s mother, Jade Tiuong, immigrated from Vietnam. They told Jason they would try to support him the best they could and are “very, very, very happy that four years passed and he’s about to graduate. He has grown so much, and I’m very proud,” Minh Chu says.

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New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

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A Study on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist from the Perspective of New Historicism

Literature seeps into every aspect of human life, especially culture and history. Storytelling remains to be one of the important ways to pass down the culture, even if the author does not do it intentionally. Historicism was the first approach that focused on the way spirit of the era was reflected in the literary works. New historicism took it a step ahead and declared that instead of era’s spirit, one could see the ideas dominant power imposed on people through literature. Historicism saw literature as a destination in power and history, but new historicism saw literature as a tool and emphasized the fact that no author was free of their era and its influence. While historicism stated that no literary work could be free of its time, new historicism adapted this idea and developed it more, and in new historicism’s viewpoint, no literary work could be free of its time and power relations. In fact, the environment of the culture was the highest priority when interpreting a text in terms of literature.

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Open. Writ. Doors. J.

Paola Aguilar

This paper will present in the first place a brief summary of the book Oliver Twist, so as to familiarize the reader with the text. Secondly, it will describe the meaning of Britishness from a social perspective and its role to link people from different backgrounds, as stated by Khan (cited by Johnson, 2007). Then, it will deepen in the role of faith to shape the ideal British citizen regarding the responsibilities that British people had with their fellows, taking into account Bunting"s (Cited by Jhonson, 2008) perspective. Later, it will set the ideal of forming tolerant and respectful citizens as described by Cruse (2008). Finally, it will demonstrate the role of mutual help, pride and freedom encountered in 1 This analysis is based on the learning experience from the seminar on Literature in English I whose main objective was to portray a general view of the scope of literature through a brief analysis of three different dimensions and its relationship with the spirit of Britishness and Americanism. Yet, it is a comprehensive academic exercise of epistemological implications where learners are no longer passive consumers of information but meaningful producers of knowledge (Fernández, 2013).

journals.library.wisc.edu

Dawnene Hassett

Moses O L U D E L E Idowu

"Problematics of Reading the Literary Text Through times and Cultures"

The moment of writing a literary work is a historical moment that expresses a human experience with all its aesthetics, thoughts, pains, joys, colors, hopes, imaginations and feelings that were destined to see the light at a specific moment in time. Reality shows us a lot of literary works that have proven their existence over time, and which are still vibrant with life, as if we were discovering them for the first time. What makes the literary work survive the test of time?

Methods of literary history revolve around the question of what the fields accompanying literary fields are and how they can be determined because, like a gradually growing and developing organism, literary histories need to complement and reproduce themselves in terms of knowledge, comment and method in order to be able to reveal a picture of the literary world at intervals and through new devices developed in accordance with the needs. Indeed, it wishes to systematize the relationships of the literary works with literary periods and with literary and non-literary factors like socio-cultural conditions. The need for making the literary history within the scope of certain criteria has brought along suggestions by different conceptual approaches. In this study, methods of literary history will be presented from a general perspective. Key Words: literary history, literary methodology, postmodern paradigm

Res Cogitans

Rasmus Vangshardt

In a metahistorical perspective, the present articles demonstrates that identifications of radical rupture in history often work as an attempt to deny the role of the historical within the humanities and especially within the discipline of comparative literature; it furthermore argues that it also influences the possibility of general cultural criticism because it presupposes certain ontological assumptions of time and history and a specific idea of what ‘modern society’ is. The article concludes by discussing two strategies for a more coherent notion of literary history in C.S. Lewis’ historiographical essays and Bruno Latour’s theory of science respectively. This leads to the claim of the inevitability of history within the humanities: One cannot get dispose of it, even if that were desirable; luckily that is not even the case.

Michel Delville

Literature Now argues that modern literary history is currently the main site of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies. Via 19 key terms, the book takes stock of recent scholarship and demonstrates how analyses of particular historical phenomena have modified our understanding of crucial notions like archive, book, event, media, objects, style and the senses. The book not only reveals a rich diversity of subjects and approaches but also identifies the most salient traits of literature and literary studies today.

Journal of Audiovisual Translation

The paper will focus on how history is reshaped in a case study: the film adaptation of Oliver Twist (2005). It is of significance as its Chinese authorised subtitles mediate nineteenth-century British history for a contemporary Chinese audience. But this adaptation creates various problems of translation as it negotiates the cultural and linguistic transfer between early Victorian England and twenty-first-century China. To illustrate the challenge that translators and audiences face, examples drawn from the subtitles are grouped under Eva Wai-Yee Hung's (1980) suggested aspects of Dickens's world: "religious beliefs, social conventions, biblical and literary allusions and the dress and hairstyle of the Victorian era". Moreover, Andrew Higson's "heritage" theory (1996a), William Morris's (Bassnett, 2013) views of historical translation and Nathalie Ramière's (2010) cultural references specific to Audiovisual Translation are adopted to read the Chinese subtitles. They are used to bring back the audiences to an impossible, inaccessible past. The historical features shown in this modern version of a British heritage film make it possible for the subtitles to interact with Chinese culture to transfer meaning via a complex combination of translation strategies. Therefore, in order to rejuvenate Chinese cultural heritage, the subtitles of the cultural and temporal specificities and complexities involved are reinterpreted and redirected to the receiving culture

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McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets in a slower era

At a glance, macroeconomic challenges continued.

McKinsey Global Private Markets Review 2024: Private markets: A slower era

If 2022 was a tale of two halves, with robust fundraising and deal activity in the first six months followed by a slowdown in the second half, then 2023 might be considered a tale of one whole. Macroeconomic headwinds persisted throughout the year, with rising financing costs, and an uncertain growth outlook taking a toll on private markets. Full-year fundraising continued to decline from 2021’s lofty peak, weighed down by the “denominator effect” that persisted in part due to a less active deal market. Managers largely held onto assets to avoid selling in a lower-multiple environment, fueling an activity-dampening cycle in which distribution-starved limited partners (LPs) reined in new commitments.

About the authors

This article is a summary of a larger report, available as a PDF, that is a collaborative effort by Fredrik Dahlqvist , Alastair Green , Paul Maia, Alexandra Nee , David Quigley , Aditya Sanghvi , Connor Mangan, John Spivey, Rahel Schneider, and Brian Vickery , representing views from McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice.

Performance in most private asset classes remained below historical averages for a second consecutive year. Decade-long tailwinds from low and falling interest rates and consistently expanding multiples seem to be things of the past. As private market managers look to boost performance in this new era of investing, a deeper focus on revenue growth and margin expansion will be needed now more than ever.

Perspectives on a slower era in private markets

Global fundraising contracted.

Fundraising fell 22 percent across private market asset classes globally to just over $1 trillion, as of year-end reported data—the lowest total since 2017. Fundraising in North America, a rare bright spot in 2022, declined in line with global totals, while in Europe, fundraising proved most resilient, falling just 3 percent. In Asia, fundraising fell precipitously and now sits 72 percent below the region’s 2018 peak.

Despite difficult fundraising conditions, headwinds did not affect all strategies or managers equally. Private equity (PE) buyout strategies posted their best fundraising year ever, and larger managers and vehicles also fared well, continuing the prior year’s trend toward greater fundraising concentration.

The numerator effect persisted

Despite a marked recovery in the denominator—the 1,000 largest US retirement funds grew 7 percent in the year ending September 2023, after falling 14 percent the prior year, for example 1 “U.S. retirement plans recover half of 2022 losses amid no-show recession,” Pensions and Investments , February 12, 2024. —many LPs remain overexposed to private markets relative to their target allocations. LPs started 2023 overweight: according to analysis from CEM Benchmarking, average allocations across PE, infrastructure, and real estate were at or above target allocations as of the beginning of the year. And the numerator grew throughout the year, as a lack of exits and rebounding valuations drove net asset values (NAVs) higher. While not all LPs strictly follow asset allocation targets, our analysis in partnership with global private markets firm StepStone Group suggests that an overallocation of just one percentage point can reduce planned commitments by as much as 10 to 12 percent per year for five years or more.

Despite these headwinds, recent surveys indicate that LPs remain broadly committed to private markets. In fact, the majority plan to maintain or increase allocations over the medium to long term.

Investors fled to known names and larger funds

Fundraising concentration reached its highest level in over a decade, as investors continued to shift new commitments in favor of the largest fund managers. The 25 most successful fundraisers collected 41 percent of aggregate commitments to closed-end funds (with the top five managers accounting for nearly half that total). Closed-end fundraising totals may understate the extent of concentration in the industry overall, as the largest managers also tend to be more successful in raising non-institutional capital.

While the largest funds grew even larger—the largest vehicles on record were raised in buyout, real estate, infrastructure, and private debt in 2023—smaller and newer funds struggled. Fewer than 1,700 funds of less than $1 billion were closed during the year, half as many as closed in 2022 and the fewest of any year since 2012. New manager formation also fell to the lowest level since 2012, with just 651 new firms launched in 2023.

Whether recent fundraising concentration and a spate of M&A activity signals the beginning of oft-rumored consolidation in the private markets remains uncertain, as a similar pattern developed in each of the last two fundraising downturns before giving way to renewed entrepreneurialism among general partners (GPs) and commitment diversification among LPs. Compared with how things played out in the last two downturns, perhaps this movie really is different, or perhaps we’re watching a trilogy reusing a familiar plotline.

Dry powder inventory spiked (again)

Private markets assets under management totaled $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023, and have grown nearly 20 percent per annum since 2018. Dry powder reserves—the amount of capital committed but not yet deployed—increased to $3.7 trillion, marking the ninth consecutive year of growth. Dry powder inventory—the amount of capital available to GPs expressed as a multiple of annual deployment—increased for the second consecutive year in PE, as new commitments continued to outpace deal activity. Inventory sat at 1.6 years in 2023, up markedly from the 0.9 years recorded at the end of 2021 but still within the historical range. NAV grew as well, largely driven by the reluctance of managers to exit positions and crystallize returns in a depressed multiple environment.

Private equity strategies diverged

Buyout and venture capital, the two largest PE sub-asset classes, charted wildly different courses over the past 18 months. Buyout notched its highest fundraising year ever in 2023, and its performance improved, with funds posting a (still paltry) 5 percent net internal rate of return through September 30. And although buyout deal volumes declined by 19 percent, 2023 was still the third-most-active year on record. In contrast, venture capital (VC) fundraising declined by nearly 60 percent, equaling its lowest total since 2015, and deal volume fell by 36 percent to the lowest level since 2019. VC funds returned –3 percent through September, posting negative returns for seven consecutive quarters. VC was the fastest-growing—as well as the highest-performing—PE strategy by a significant margin from 2010 to 2022, but investors appear to be reevaluating their approach in the current environment.

Private equity entry multiples contracted

PE buyout entry multiples declined by roughly one turn from 11.9 to 11.0 times EBITDA, slightly outpacing the decline in public market multiples (down from 12.1 to 11.3 times EBITDA), through the first nine months of 2023. For nearly a decade leading up to 2022, managers consistently sold assets into a higher-multiple environment than that in which they had bought those assets, providing a substantial performance tailwind for the industry. Nowhere has this been truer than in technology. After experiencing more than eight turns of multiple expansion from 2009 to 2021 (the most of any sector), technology multiples have declined by nearly three turns in the past two years, 50 percent more than in any other sector. Overall, roughly two-thirds of the total return for buyout deals that were entered in 2010 or later and exited in 2021 or before can be attributed to market multiple expansion and leverage. Now, with falling multiples and higher financing costs, revenue growth and margin expansion are taking center stage for GPs.

Real estate receded

Demand uncertainty, slowing rent growth, and elevated financing costs drove cap rates higher and made price discovery challenging, all of which weighed on deal volume, fundraising, and investment performance. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent year over year, and funds returned −4 percent in the first nine months of the year, losing money for the first time since the 2007–08 global financial crisis. Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity via redemptions in open-end vehicles, from which net outflows reached their highest level in at least two decades. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, with investors focusing on capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive. Rising interest rates widened bid–ask spreads and impaired deal volume across food groups, including in what were formerly hot sectors: multifamily and industrial.

Private debt pays dividends

Debt again proved to be the most resilient private asset class against a turbulent market backdrop. Fundraising declined just 13 percent, largely driven by lower commitments to direct lending strategies, for which a slower PE deal environment has made capital deployment challenging. The asset class also posted the highest returns among all private asset classes through September 30. Many private debt securities are tied to floating rates, which enhance returns in a rising-rate environment. Thus far, managers appear to have successfully navigated the rising incidence of default and distress exhibited across the broader leveraged-lending market. Although direct lending deal volume declined from 2022, private lenders financed an all-time high 59 percent of leveraged buyout transactions last year and are now expanding into additional strategies to drive the next era of growth.

Infrastructure took a detour

After several years of robust growth and strong performance, infrastructure and natural resources fundraising declined by 53 percent to the lowest total since 2013. Supply-side timing is partially to blame: five of the seven largest infrastructure managers closed a flagship vehicle in 2021 or 2022, and none of those five held a final close last year. As in real estate, investors shied away from core and core-plus investments in a higher-yield environment. Yet there are reasons to believe infrastructure’s growth will bounce back. Limited partners (LPs) surveyed by McKinsey remain bullish on their deployment to the asset class, and at least a dozen vehicles targeting more than $10 billion were actively fundraising as of the end of 2023. Multiple recent acquisitions of large infrastructure GPs by global multi-asset-class managers also indicate marketwide conviction in the asset class’s potential.

Private markets still have work to do on diversity

Private markets firms are slowly improving their representation of females (up two percentage points over the prior year) and ethnic and racial minorities (up one percentage point). On some diversity metrics, including entry-level representation of women, private markets now compare favorably with corporate America. Yet broad-based parity remains elusive and too slow in the making. Ethnic, racial, and gender imbalances are particularly stark across more influential investing roles and senior positions. In fact, McKinsey’s research reveals that at the current pace, it would take several decades for private markets firms to reach gender parity at senior levels. Increasing representation across all levels will require managers to take fresh approaches to hiring, retention, and promotion.

Artificial intelligence generating excitement

The transformative potential of generative AI was perhaps 2023’s hottest topic (beyond Taylor Swift). Private markets players are excited about the potential for the technology to optimize their approach to thesis generation, deal sourcing, investment due diligence, and portfolio performance, among other areas. While the technology is still nascent and few GPs can boast scaled implementations, pilot programs are already in flight across the industry, particularly within portfolio companies. Adoption seems nearly certain to accelerate throughout 2024.

Private markets in a slower era

If private markets investors entered 2023 hoping for a return to the heady days of 2021, they likely left the year disappointed. Many of the headwinds that emerged in the latter half of 2022 persisted throughout the year, pressuring fundraising, dealmaking, and performance. Inflation moderated somewhat over the course of the year but remained stubbornly elevated by recent historical standards. Interest rates started high and rose higher, increasing the cost of financing. A reinvigorated public equity market recovered most of 2022’s losses but did little to resolve the valuation uncertainty private market investors have faced for the past 18 months.

Within private markets, the denominator effect remained in play, despite the public market recovery, as the numerator continued to expand. An activity-dampening cycle emerged: higher cost of capital and lower multiples limited the ability or willingness of general partners (GPs) to exit positions; fewer exits, coupled with continuing capital calls, pushed LP allocations higher, thereby limiting their ability or willingness to make new commitments. These conditions weighed on managers’ ability to fundraise. Based on data reported as of year-end 2023, private markets fundraising fell 22 percent from the prior year to just over $1 trillion, the largest such drop since 2009 (Exhibit 1).

The impact of the fundraising environment was not felt equally among GPs. Continuing a trend that emerged in 2022, and consistent with prior downturns in fundraising, LPs favored larger vehicles and the scaled GPs that typically manage them. Smaller and newer managers struggled, and the number of sub–$1 billion vehicles and new firm launches each declined to its lowest level in more than a decade.

Despite the decline in fundraising, private markets assets under management (AUM) continued to grow, increasing 12 percent to $13.1 trillion as of June 30, 2023. 2023 fundraising was still the sixth-highest annual haul on record, pushing dry powder higher, while the slowdown in deal making limited distributions.

Investment performance across private market asset classes fell short of historical averages. Private equity (PE) got back in the black but generated the lowest annual performance in the past 15 years, excluding 2022. Closed-end real estate produced negative returns for the first time since 2009, as capitalization (cap) rates expanded across sectors and rent growth dissipated in formerly hot sectors, including multifamily and industrial. The performance of infrastructure funds was less than half of its long-term average and even further below the double-digit returns generated in 2021 and 2022. Private debt was the standout performer (if there was one), outperforming all other private asset classes and illustrating the asset class’s countercyclical appeal.

Private equity down but not out

Higher financing costs, lower multiples, and an uncertain macroeconomic environment created a challenging backdrop for private equity managers in 2023. Fundraising declined for the second year in a row, falling 15 percent to $649 billion, as LPs grappled with the denominator effect and a slowdown in distributions. Managers were on the fundraising trail longer to raise this capital: funds that closed in 2023 were open for a record-high average of 20.1 months, notably longer than 18.7 months in 2022 and 14.1 months in 2018. VC and growth equity strategies led the decline, dropping to their lowest level of cumulative capital raised since 2015. Fundraising in Asia fell for the fourth year of the last five, with the greatest decline in China.

Despite the difficult fundraising context, a subset of strategies and managers prevailed. Buyout managers collectively had their best fundraising year on record, raising more than $400 billion. Fundraising in Europe surged by more than 50 percent, resulting in the region’s biggest haul ever. The largest managers raised an outsized share of the total for a second consecutive year, making 2023 the most concentrated fundraising year of the last decade (Exhibit 2).

Despite the drop in aggregate fundraising, PE assets under management increased 8 percent to $8.2 trillion. Only a small part of this growth was performance driven: PE funds produced a net IRR of just 2.5 percent through September 30, 2023. Buyouts and growth equity generated positive returns, while VC lost money. PE performance, dating back to the beginning of 2022, remains negative, highlighting the difficulty of generating attractive investment returns in a higher interest rate and lower multiple environment. As PE managers devise value creation strategies to improve performance, their focus includes ensuring operating efficiency and profitability of their portfolio companies.

Deal activity volume and count fell sharply, by 21 percent and 24 percent, respectively, which continued the slower pace set in the second half of 2022. Sponsors largely opted to hold assets longer rather than lock in underwhelming returns. While higher financing costs and valuation mismatches weighed on overall deal activity, certain types of M&A gained share. Add-on deals, for example, accounted for a record 46 percent of total buyout deal volume last year.

Real estate recedes

For real estate, 2023 was a year of transition, characterized by a litany of new and familiar challenges. Pandemic-driven demand issues continued, while elevated financing costs, expanding cap rates, and valuation uncertainty weighed on commercial real estate deal volumes, fundraising, and investment performance.

Managers faced one of the toughest fundraising environments in many years. Global closed-end fundraising declined 34 percent to $125 billion. While fundraising challenges were widespread, they were not ubiquitous across strategies. Dollars continued to shift to large, multi-asset class platforms, with the top five managers accounting for 37 percent of aggregate closed-end real estate fundraising. In April, the largest real estate fund ever raised closed on a record $30 billion.

Capital shifted away from core and core-plus strategies as investors sought liquidity through redemptions in open-end vehicles and reduced gross contributions to the lowest level since 2009. Opportunistic strategies benefited from this shift, as investors turned their attention toward capital appreciation over income generation in a market where alternative sources of yield have grown more attractive.

In the United States, for instance, open-end funds, as represented by the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries Fund Index—Open-End Equity (NFI-OE), recorded $13 billion in net outflows in 2023, reversing the trend of positive net inflows throughout the 2010s. The negative flows mainly reflected $9 billion in core outflows, with core-plus funds accounting for the remaining outflows, which reversed a 20-year run of net inflows.

As a result, the NAV in US open-end funds fell roughly 16 percent year over year. Meanwhile, global assets under management in closed-end funds reached a new peak of $1.7 trillion as of June 2023, growing 14 percent between June 2022 and June 2023.

Real estate underperformed historical averages in 2023, as previously high-performing multifamily and industrial sectors joined office in producing negative returns caused by slowing demand growth and cap rate expansion. Closed-end funds generated a pooled net IRR of −3.5 percent in the first nine months of 2023, losing money for the first time since the global financial crisis. The lone bright spot among major sectors was hospitality, which—thanks to a rush of postpandemic travel—returned 10.3 percent in 2023. 2 Based on NCREIFs NPI index. Hotels represent 1 percent of total properties in the index. As a whole, the average pooled lifetime net IRRs for closed-end real estate funds from 2011–20 vintages remained around historical levels (9.8 percent).

Global deal volume declined 47 percent in 2023 to reach a ten-year low of $650 billion, driven by widening bid–ask spreads amid valuation uncertainty and higher costs of financing (Exhibit 3). 3 CBRE, Real Capital Analytics Deal flow in the office sector remained depressed, partly as a result of continued uncertainty in the demand for space in a hybrid working world.

During a turbulent year for private markets, private debt was a relative bright spot, topping private markets asset classes in terms of fundraising growth, AUM growth, and performance.

Fundraising for private debt declined just 13 percent year over year, nearly ten percentage points less than the private markets overall. Despite the decline in fundraising, AUM surged 27 percent to $1.7 trillion. And private debt posted the highest investment returns of any private asset class through the first three quarters of 2023.

Private debt’s risk/return characteristics are well suited to the current environment. With interest rates at their highest in more than a decade, current yields in the asset class have grown more attractive on both an absolute and relative basis, particularly if higher rates sustain and put downward pressure on equity returns (Exhibit 4). The built-in security derived from debt’s privileged position in the capital structure, moreover, appeals to investors that are wary of market volatility and valuation uncertainty.

Direct lending continued to be the largest strategy in 2023, with fundraising for the mostly-senior-debt strategy accounting for almost half of the asset class’s total haul (despite declining from the previous year). Separately, mezzanine debt fundraising hit a new high, thanks to the closings of three of the largest funds ever raised in the strategy.

Over the longer term, growth in private debt has largely been driven by institutional investors rotating out of traditional fixed income in favor of private alternatives. Despite this growth in commitments, LPs remain underweight in this asset class relative to their targets. In fact, the allocation gap has only grown wider in recent years, a sharp contrast to other private asset classes, for which LPs’ current allocations exceed their targets on average. According to data from CEM Benchmarking, the private debt allocation gap now stands at 1.4 percent, which means that, in aggregate, investors must commit hundreds of billions in net new capital to the asset class just to reach current targets.

Private debt was not completely immune to the macroeconomic conditions last year, however. Fundraising declined for the second consecutive year and now sits 23 percent below 2021’s peak. Furthermore, though private lenders took share in 2023 from other capital sources, overall deal volumes also declined for the second year in a row. The drop was largely driven by a less active PE deal environment: private debt is predominantly used to finance PE-backed companies, though managers are increasingly diversifying their origination capabilities to include a broad new range of companies and asset types.

Infrastructure and natural resources take a detour

For infrastructure and natural resources fundraising, 2023 was an exceptionally challenging year. Aggregate capital raised declined 53 percent year over year to $82 billion, the lowest annual total since 2013. The size of the drop is particularly surprising in light of infrastructure’s recent momentum. The asset class had set fundraising records in four of the previous five years, and infrastructure is often considered an attractive investment in uncertain markets.

While there is little doubt that the broader fundraising headwinds discussed elsewhere in this report affected infrastructure and natural resources fundraising last year, dynamics specific to the asset class were at play as well. One issue was supply-side timing: nine of the ten largest infrastructure GPs did not close a flagship fund in 2023. Second was the migration of investor dollars away from core and core-plus investments, which have historically accounted for the bulk of infrastructure fundraising, in a higher rate environment.

The asset class had some notable bright spots last year. Fundraising for higher-returning opportunistic strategies more than doubled the prior year’s total (Exhibit 5). AUM grew 18 percent, reaching a new high of $1.5 trillion. Infrastructure funds returned a net IRR of 3.4 percent in 2023; this was below historical averages but still the second-best return among private asset classes. And as was the case in other asset classes, investors concentrated commitments in larger funds and managers in 2023, including in the largest infrastructure fund ever raised.

The outlook for the asset class, moreover, remains positive. Funds targeting a record amount of capital were in the market at year-end, providing a robust foundation for fundraising in 2024 and 2025. A recent spate of infrastructure GP acquisitions signal multi-asset managers’ long-term conviction in the asset class, despite short-term headwinds. Global megatrends like decarbonization and digitization, as well as revolutions in energy and mobility, have spurred new infrastructure investment opportunities around the world, particularly for value-oriented investors that are willing to take on more risk.

Private markets make measured progress in DEI

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become an important part of the fundraising, talent, and investing landscape for private market participants. Encouragingly, incremental progress has been made in recent years, including more diverse talent being brought to entry-level positions, investing roles, and investment committees. The scope of DEI metrics provided to institutional investors during fundraising has also increased in recent years: more than half of PE firms now provide data across investing teams, portfolio company boards, and portfolio company management (versus investment team data only). 4 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023.

In 2023, McKinsey surveyed 66 global private markets firms that collectively employ more than 60,000 people for the second annual State of diversity in global private markets report. 5 “ The state of diversity in global private markets: 2023 ,” McKinsey, August 22, 2023. The research offers insight into the representation of women and ethnic and racial minorities in private investing as of year-end 2022. In this chapter, we discuss where the numbers stand and how firms can bring a more diverse set of perspectives to the table.

The statistics indicate signs of modest advancement. Overall representation of women in private markets increased two percentage points to 35 percent, and ethnic and racial minorities increased one percentage point to 30 percent (Exhibit 6). Entry-level positions have nearly reached gender parity, with female representation at 48 percent. The share of women holding C-suite roles globally increased 3 percentage points, while the share of people from ethnic and racial minorities in investment committees increased 9 percentage points. There is growing evidence that external hiring is gradually helping close the diversity gap, especially at senior levels. For example, 33 percent of external hires at the managing director level were ethnic or racial minorities, higher than their existing representation level (19 percent).

Yet, the scope of the challenge remains substantial. Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in senior positions and investing roles. They also experience uneven rates of progress due to lower promotion and higher attrition rates, particularly at smaller firms. Firms are also navigating an increasingly polarized workplace today, with additional scrutiny and a growing number of lawsuits against corporate diversity and inclusion programs, particularly in the US, which threatens to impact the industry’s pace of progress.

Fredrik Dahlqvist is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Stockholm office; Alastair Green is a senior partner in the Washington, DC, office, where Paul Maia and Alexandra Nee are partners; David Quigley is a senior partner in the New York office, where Connor Mangan is an associate partner and Aditya Sanghvi is a senior partner; Rahel Schneider is an associate partner in the Bay Area office; John Spivey is a partner in the Charlotte office; and Brian Vickery is a partner in the Boston office.

The authors wish to thank Jonathan Christy, Louis Dufau, Vaibhav Gujral, Graham Healy-Day, Laura Johnson, Ryan Luby, Tripp Norton, Alastair Rami, Henri Torbey, and Alex Wolkomir for their contributions

The authors would also like to thank CEM Benchmarking and the StepStone Group for their partnership in this year's report.

This article was edited by Arshiya Khullar, an editor in the Gurugram office.

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Private equity turns to resiliency strategies for software investments

The state of diversity in global Private Markets: 2023

The state of diversity in global private markets: 2022

2024 cohort of New Generation Thinkers announced by BBC and AHRC

Head on chalkboard with light bulb notes inside.

16 May 2024

Ten of the UK’s most promising arts and humanities early career researchers have been announced as this year’s BBC and AHRC New Generation Thinkers.

Every year, a nationwide search is held for the best new arts and humanities academics with ideas that will resonate with a wider audience on BBC radio. From hundreds of applications, these 10 New Generation Thinkers represent some of the best early career researchers in the country.

They will be given the opportunity to share their pioneering research with BBC Radio 4 listeners. They will also be provided with unique access to training and support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the BBC.

The 2024 New Generation Thinkers will bring new insights into diverse topics, with research including the:

possible existence of the multiverse
future of black literature
surprisingly dark history of Technicolor film
search for the greatest philosopher who never existed

The names of the 10 researchers were announced as part of a New Thinking episode of the Arts & Ideas podcast hosted by former New Generation Thinker Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough.

The 2024 New Generation Thinkers.

Shaping thought and discussion

Professor Christopher Smith, AHRC Executive Chair says:

The New Generation Thinkers programme brings interesting, important ideas into the public consciousness, shaping thought and discussion. From fundamental questions about the nature of reality to how political propagandists harnessed the seductive power of Technicolor, and the impact of imprisonment on mothers and children, and the most challenging problems of our day, these are ideas of thrilling originality and importance. These ten brilliant, original thinkers demonstrate the ability of the arts and humanities to help us to better understand both ourselves and the world around us.

A new home of listeners

Matthew Dodd, Commissioning Editor, Arts, BBC Radio 3 and 4 said:

We’re looking forward to working with ten of the most promising early-career academics. Each year the New Generation Thinker scheme brings radio production teams a wave of stimulating and thought-provoking contributors who have a passion for public engagement. After over a decade of successful partnership with BBC Radio 3, it’s great to be bringing their ideas to a new home of listeners on BBC Radio 4, the biggest speech radio station in the UK, where they’ll find a wide audience.

Further information

Childcare: a history of love and work.

Dr Emily Baughan, The University of Sheffield

Dr Emily Baughan is interested in how children are cared for, and by whom. Her first book ‘Saving the Children’, explored the origins of a global humanitarian movement focused on the very young. She is currently working on a new project, titled ‘Childcare: A History of Love and Work’.

Emily’s research into two centuries of childhood includes baby farms in Victorian London and children’s prison camps in colonial Kenya. She has examined the origins of international adoption, and radical feminist nurseries in 1970s Italy and the US. She is currently writing about maternity care and childcare in present-day Britain.

Emily is a senior lecturer in history at The University of Sheffield.

Serving the self: performance at work

Dr Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, Queen Mary, University of London

For many of us, the demand to perform is now part of our working lives, from serving the customer in hospitality, to prioritising ‘soft skills’ in the office, to the way care is performed in education and health.

Dr Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal’s work explores how these imperatives to present certain feelings, characteristics or behaviours have become embedded within contemporary work.

Combining her expertise in performance and actor training with accounts drawn from managers, customers and employees, her research asks why so much of modern work feels like putting on an act.

Jaswinder is a lecturer in the Drama Department at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research has been published in Platform, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and in Bloomsbury’s History of Emotions series.

Reading, sentimentality, and empathy

Dr Janine Bradbury, University of York

Dr Janine Bradbury is an award-winning poet and critic. She is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Writing and Culture at the University of York. Janine completed a part-time PhD in African American women’s writing at The University of Sheffield (2008 to 2015).

Janine’s research and creative practice is wide-ranging. Her work on Grace Jones, American professional wrestling, passing-for-white, comedy, Toni Morrison, and motherhood has been published by Bloomsbury, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, the Guardian, the Young Vic Theatre, The Emma Press, Magma, and Oxford Poetry (and elsewhere). She has contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 4 (Woman’s Hour and Great Lives).

Her current work explores the relationship between love, feeling, and reading (words, people, situations). Her debut poetry pamphlet ‘Sometimes Real Love Comes Quick and Easy’ (2024, ignitionpress) explores sentimentality.

Scriptocurrency: the new language of British nature poets of colour

Jade Cuttle, University of Cambridge

Jade Cuttle is an award-winning writer and AHRC-funded researcher at Cambridge, studying the coinings of British nature poets of colour. Applying her experience in metal detecting and mudlarking to the field of literature, she unearths evidence of shared currency and an overlooked tradition.

She is writing a book called Silthood, a term she coined to explore ancient connections to the earth. Supervised by Robert Macfarlane, her research precedes the publication of Nature Matters: New Poetries by Black and Asian Writers of the diaspora.

Jade won a ‘30 To Watch: Journalism Award’ for her Arts Commissioning Editor work at The Times, with televised appearances on BBC One, ITV and Look North. She’s also a historical reenactor, one of Britain’s first female warriors of colour.

Sound, listening and intimacy in everyday life

Dr Jacob Downs, University of Oxford

Everywhere you look, people are using intimate sound technologies to reshape and enrich their experiences of the world. They surround themselves in the ‘bubbles’ of noise-cancelling headphones to listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and whispered pop vocals. Why are we seeking out intimate sound-worlds so much in the 21st century?

In his research, Dr Jacob Downs places contemporary listening under the microscope to investigate the effects of new sound media on our everyday lives.

Dr Jacob Downs is departmental lecturer in music at the University of Oxford, where he researches and lectures on topics in 20th and 21st-century music and sound.

He is currently writing two books (one on headphone listening, the other on environmentalist music) and articles on subjects ranging from artificial intelligence-generated music to Beyoncé’s latest album.

In search of Zera Yacob: the greatest philosopher who never existed

Jonathan Egid, King’s College London

Philosophers often question the nature of being, but what about when the existence of the philosopher themself is in question? Jonathan Egid has spent the past few years digging through the archives on the trail of a brilliant and neglected thinker from 17th century Ethiopia, and the question of whether he existed.

Exploring the philosophy and fraught politics of the Hatata Zera Yacob, a philosophical autobiography that may or may not be a forgery, his research examines the contemporary resonances of this enigmatic text for our age of violent conflict. It explores the role it can play in debates about diversifying and decolonising philosophy.

Jonathan Egid is a PhD candidate at King’s College London and a research fellow at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His essays on philosophy, history and literature appear regularly in the Times Literary Supplement, Aeon and elsewhere.

He is currently working on two books, one on the Hatata Zera Yacob and another on Jewish life in postwar Poland. He also hosts the podcast and interview series ‘Philosophising In…’ on philosophy in lesser-studied languages.

Peeling off motherhood

Dr Shona Minson, University of Oxford

Originally from Belfast, Dr Shona Minson is an award-winning criminologist at the University of Oxford, whose first career as a family and criminal barrister led her to explore families and punishment.

Shona is a unique voice and a leading authority on how to do justice better for women and their children. She contributes regularly to public conversations about the wider consequences of punishment, and women’s justice issues.

Her innovative short films based on interviews with children, mothers and grandmothers affected by maternal imprisonment, changed legal professional practice in the UK and overseas.

Her first book highlighted the lack of concern given to children whose mothers are imprisoned and the next examines the impact on society when the motherhood of criminalised women is disregarded.

The dark side of the rainbow

Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, University College London

Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is interested in the politics of making images in colour. Exploring the raw ingredients, labour and technologies that go into making colourful images, her research asks: can colour be immoral? Dangerous? Bad for the environment? She asks: is there a dark side of the rainbow?

From Technicolor musicals to Instagram, her work helps us understand how colours that appear to be frivolous distractions might also harbour deep political power.

Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a lecturer in film and media at UCL. She received her PhD in Film Studies and History of Art from Yale University.

Her award-winning book ‘The Rainbow’s Gravity’ reveals how modern colour media technologies transformed the way Britain saw itself and its empire. She currently co-convenes the AHRC research network ‘Bombay Film Colour’.

Exploring the multiverse

Dr Jack Symes, Durham University

Jack Symes is a public philosopher and researcher at Durham University. His public work explores all areas of philosophy, while his academic research lies at the intersection of metaphysics and religion.

Jack’s current project investigates the multiverse: whether our universe exists as one among many and, if so, the significance of our place within it.

Jack is the host of The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast, one of the UK’s most popular philosophy programmes. He also edits Bloomsbury’s Talking about Philosophy book series, which features contributions from the field’s leading thinkers.

Jack’s books include:

Philosophers on Consciousness: Talking about the Mind (2022)
Philosophers on God: Talking about Existence (2024)
Defeating the Evil-God Challenge: In Defence of God’s Goodness (2024)

Moving images: picturing crises differently

Dr Becca Voelcker, Goldsmiths, University of London

In a contemporary media landscape saturated by divisive representations of social and ecological crises, Dr Becca Voelcker’s research explores artistic and filmic responses and tries to stimulate visual literacy.

Becca lectures in art and film history at Goldsmiths, University of London, specialising in representations of land since the 1970s. Becca received her PhD from Harvard University in 2021.

She is currently writing her first book, a cross-cultural history of eco-political cinema based in 10 locations including Wales, where Becca grew up, and Japan, where she lived as a young adult.

Alongside research, Becca writes for ‘Sight and Sound’ and ‘Frieze’, introduces films at the British Film Institute, and serves on film festival juries.

Top image: Credit: yangwenshuang, E+ via Getty Images

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New Historicism
New historicism has been a hugely influential approach to literature, especially in studies of William Shakespeare's works and literature of the Early Modern period. It began in earnest in 1980 and quickly supplanted New Criticism as the new orthodoxy in early modern studies. Despite many attacks from feminists, cultural materialists, and ...
What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?
New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism are both literary theories and critical approaches that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. They both focus on the relationship between literature and its historical/cultural context. New Historicism rejects the idea of literary works as isolated, timeless creations and instead emphasizes their embeddedness in the socio-political and ...
Library Guides: Literary Research: New Historicism
Articles & Research Databases Literature on your research topic and direct access to articles online, when available at UW. ... "New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a ...
The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics on JSTOR
An imprecise label, the new historicism is used with most precision in Renaissance studies where it is contrasted to feminism and British cultural materialism, as well as an older historicism and formalism. Its powerful impact on Renaissance studies has led, predictably, to numerous critiques, some hostile, but many sympathetic, conducted as ...
New Historicism
New Historicism By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 22, 2020 • ( 0). In 1982 Stephen Greenblatt edited a special issue of Genre on Renaissance writing, and in his introduction to this volume he claimed that the articles he had solicited were engaged in a joint enterprise, namely, an effort to rethink the ways that early modern texts were situated within the larger spectrum of discourses and ...
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(PDF) New Historicism: Concepts and Guidelines
Finally, the new horizons which New Historicism offers for analysis and comprehension of literary works will be delineated. Discover the world's research 25+ million members
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The New Criticism, or formalism, is just about the oldest ap proach to literature and literary study currently being practiced. The new historicism, by contrast, is not as old-fashioned as formalism, but it is hardly new, either. The term "new" eventually and inevitably re quires some explanation. In the case of the new historicism, the best
(PDF) NEW HISTORICISM THEORY
2015 reprint. This paper aims to examine the status, roots and development of New Historicism as an epochmaking approach in the context of critical analysis. After Stephen Greenblatt coined the term "New Historicism," Louis Montrose and Greenblatt improved the theory and applied it in different studies, thus contributing to the area.
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New Historicist Criticism is a research method, a type of textual research, that literary critics use to interpret textsa genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts. Key Terms: Dialectic; Hermeneutics; Semiotics; Text & Intertextuality; Tone American critic Stephen Greenblatt coined the term "New Historicism" (5) in
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THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY is to describe the recent development in. literary criticism known as the New Historicism. Its design is to question the assumptions of the New Historicism by tracing its antecedents and suggesting some ofthe problems this essentiallypoliticalapproach engenders. Itconcludes with an opinion that the historian has an ...
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Apply New Historicism To Your Reading. When reading a work through a New Historicism reading, apply the following steps: Determine the time and place, or historical context of the literature. Choose a specific aspect of the text you feel would be illuminated by learning more about the history of the text. Research the history.
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The book's first two chapters explore the theoretical moorings of new historicism in Geertzian anthropology, British radical history and French Foucauldianism. The next four demonstrate, as the title suggests, new historical practice: each author is respon- sible for two chapters on her or his period of specialty, and interrelated strands of ...
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New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and intrepreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic. Based on the literary criticism of Stephen Greenblatt and influenced by the philosophy of Michel Foucault, New Historicism acknowledges not only that a work ...
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DOI link for The New Historicism. The New Historicism. Edited By Harold Veeser. Edition 1st Edition. First Published 1989. eBook Published 2 December 2013. Pub. ... The New Historicism and other Old-fashioned Topics . By Brook Thomas. chapter 13 | 9 pages The Nation as Imagined Community . By Jean Franco.
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The new BBIH update also reveals a taste for more episodic and perhaps experimental forms of historical biography. Family and group lives remain popular, with no network as popular as Dr Johnson and his circles, not least in Leo Damrosch's collective biography, The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends who Shaped an Age.Others employ a biographical approach despite the partiality of sources ...
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Find the latest published documents for new historicism, Related hot topics, top authors, the most cited documents, and related journals. ... (1935). The results of this research are as follows. First, historical representations are marked by fear, restraint, compulsion, and counterforce of indigenous people in the colonial period before and ...
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A Study on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist from the Perspective of New
New historicism took it a step ahead and declared that instead of era's spirit, one could see the ideas dominant power imposed on people through literature. Historicism saw literature as a destination in power and history, but new historicism saw literature as a tool and emphasized the fact that no author was free of their era and its influence.
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Fundraising for higher-returning opportunistic strategies more than doubled the prior year's total (Exhibit 5). AUM grew 18 percent, reaching a new high of $1.5 trillion. Infrastructure funds returned a net IRR of 3.4 percent in 2023; this was below historical averages but still the second-best return among private asset classes.
2024 cohort of New Generation Thinkers announced by BBC and AHRC
The 2024 New Generation Thinkers will bring new insights into diverse topics, with research including the: ... She is currently working on a new project, titled 'Childcare: A History of Love and Work'. ... Her research has been published in Platform, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and in Bloomsbury's History of Emotions series.
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New Historicism by Neema Parvini LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0015

24 What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?

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Scholarship: An Excerpt from the Introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Cultural Studies: From “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular'” by Stuart Hall

How to Use New Historicism and Cultural Studies as Critical Approaches

Applying New Historicism Techniques to Literature

“Lament for Dark Peoples”

Limitations of New Historicism and Cultural Studies Criticism

New Historicism and Cultural Criticism Scholars

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Table of Contents

Foundational Questions of New Historicist Criticism

Brevity - Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Coherence - How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Flow - How to Create Flow in Writing

Inclusivity - Inclusive Language

The Elements of Style - The DNA of Powerful Writing

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Other Topics:

Citation - Definition - Introduction to Citation in Academic & Professional Writing

Collaboration - What is the Role of Collaboration in Academic & Professional Writing?

Information Literacy - Discerning Quality Information from Noise

Rhetoric: Exploring Its Definition and Impact on Modern Communication

The Writing Process - Research on Composing

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Academic Writing – How to Write for the Academic Community

Professional Writing – How to Write for the Professional World

Credibility & Authority – How to Be Credible & Authoritative in Speech & Writing

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10.7: New Historicism

The Relationship Between History and Literature

Exercise 10.7.1

History Influences Literature

Literature Influences History

Exercise 10.7.2

New Historicism Practice

Apply New Historicism To Your Reading

Apply New Historicism To Your Writing

Contributors and Attributions

What’s trending in new historical writing? Four perspectives from the Bibliography of British and Irish History

The ‘animal turn’ in BBIH, by Roey Sweet

‘Female religious orders and houses’, by Sara Charles

‘Biography’, by Philip Carter

‘Celebrity’, by Simon Baker

About the Bibliography of British and Irish History

new historicism Recently Published Documents

Ranahar: Textuality of History, Culture and Politics