what is the new historicism essay

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

Introduction, general overviews.

• Essay Collections
• Theoretical Influences
• Scholarly Influences
• Book-Length Studies
• 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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28 Practicing New Historicism and Cultural Studies

For our New Historicism and cultural studies theoretical response, we will take a slightly different approach compared with previous chapters. Everyone will read an excerpt from The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald and review four film trailers and reviews below. You’ll then choose between two options to complete your theoretical response. Note that in both cases, your theoretical response will be slightly longer (750-1000 words) this week because you’ll need to integrate multiple sources.

Option One: New Historicism

Using the artifacts listed below, apply the techniques of New Historicism to explore how these texts exist and interact within their contexts. Here are the four required artifacts:

• Excerpt from  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• “Lament for Dark Peoples” by Langston Hughes (1926)
• The 1926 film trailer for The Great Gatsby  (below)
• The 1926 New York Times film review for The Great Gatsby  (note: you will need to use your free student account to access this article).

You may also want to do some brief research about the historical conditions of 1925-1926 in the United States. Focus on the artifacts as evidence of their historical contexts. Your response should be 750-1000 words and include a brief thesis statement that reflects your critical approach.

Here are some questions to consider as you write your response:

• What do we need to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald to understand The Great Gatsby as a cultural artifact? What do we need to know about Langston Hughes? And how does purely biographical criticism differ from a New Historicism approach?
• What are some of the main historical events that occurred in the period when the book, poem, and film were created? Do you see these historical events reflected in these three artifacts?
• How might this historical context shape the creation of these three cultural artifacts? How does the 1926 film review affect your understanding of this context?
• Do we see congruity in messaging around social norms in these three artifacts? What are those social norms? Are there any missing or excluded voices in these artifacts? If so, why?
• What other artifacts might you consider if you wanted to learn more or confirm your theories about the historical context for these three artifacts? For example, what kinds of advertisements would you expect to see in this issue of the New York Times ?
• How do we view these artifacts and their societal/cultural norms from our modern perspective? In other words, have our cultural/societal norms remained stable in the 60 years since these cultural artifacts were published? If not, what significant changes have occurred?

Option Two: Cultural Studies

Film and media studies are common cultural studies approaches. For this option, you’ll have more choice over your artifacts, and you’ll be considering the text and the film artifacts as examples of the cultures that produced them. You’ll need to use the following artifact:

Then choose any two film trailers and reviews from the 1949, 1974, and 2013 versions linked below.

In addition to considering the historical and cultural context of the novel, you should also do some brief historical research about the two film years that you choose. Focus on the artifacts as evidence of the culture that produced and received them, and consider how and why that reception has changed over time. Your response should be 750-1000 words and include a brief thesis statement that reflects your critical approach.

• What do we need to know about F. Scott Fitzgerald to understand The Great Gatsby as a cultural artifact? What did “popular culture” look like in the mid 1920s in the United States?
• What cultural norms do you see reflected in the two film adaptations you chose? How do the cultural norms when these movies were made compare with the cultural norms in the novel excerpt?
• How do the film reviews affect your understanding of this cultural context?
• How have social norms and the messaging around them changed in these three artifacts? What are those social norms? Are there any missing or excluded voices in these artifacts? If so, why?
• What other artifacts might you consider if you wanted to learn more or confirm your theories about societal and cultural norms in these three artifacts? For example, what kinds of advertisements would you expect to see in this issue of the New York Times ?
• How do we view these artifacts and their societal/cultural norms from our modern perspective? Have our views changed since these cultural artifacts were published? (This may be an especially interesting question if you choose the 2013 version).

Post your short essay (using either option one or option two) to the New Historicism/Cultural Studies Theoretical Response discussion board. Please include the option you have chosen in your post title. I have included the theoretical response assignment instructions at the end of this chapter.

Excerpt from “The Great Gatsby” (1925)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission. I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby’s, it said, if I would attend his “little party” that night. He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand. Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key. As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone. I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden. Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby. “Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden. “I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up. “I remembered you lived next door to—” She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the steps. “Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.” That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before. “You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month ago.” “You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started, but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. “Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl beside her. “The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an alert confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for you, Lucille?” It was for Lucille, too. “I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.” “Did you keep it?” asked Jordan. “Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.” “There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with  any body.” “Who doesn’t?” I inquired. “Gatsby. Somebody told me—” The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially. “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.” A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. “I don’t think it’s so much  that ,” argued Lucille sceptically; “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war.” One of the men nodded in confirmation. “I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively. “Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.” She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world. The first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gaiety. “Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.” We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas. A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. “What do you think?” he demanded impetuously. “About what?” He waved his hand toward the bookshelves. “About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.” “The books?” He nodded. “Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.” Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the  Stoddard Lectures . “See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?” He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse. “Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.” Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering. “I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.” “Has it?” “A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—” “You told us.” We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors. There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners—and a great number of single girls dancing individually or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound. At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled. “Your face is familiar,” he said politely. “Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?” “Why yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.” “I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.” We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning. “Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.” “What time?” “Any time that suits you best.” It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled. “Having a gay time now?” she inquired. “Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.” For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand. “I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly. “What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.” “I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.” He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on  you  with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care. Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us in turn. “If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.” When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years. “Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?” “He’s just a man named Gatsby.” “Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?” “Now  you ’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile. “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.” A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away. “However, I don’t believe it.” “Why not?” “I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.” Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound. “Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody laughed. “The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World!’ ” The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World” was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link. “I beg your pardon.” Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us. “Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.” “With me?” she exclaimed in surprise. “Yes, madame.” She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings. I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate, who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join him, I went inside. The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep. “She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl at my elbow. I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear. The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices. “Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.” “Never heard anything so selfish in my life.” “We’re always the first ones to leave.” “So are we.” “Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.” In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night. As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as several people approached him to say goodbye. Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake hands. “I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?” “Why, about an hour.” “It was… simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully in my face. “Please come and see me… Phone book… Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard… My aunt…” She was hurrying off as she talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door. Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden. “Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock.” Then the butler, behind his shoulder: “Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.” “All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there… Good night.” “Good night.” “Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. “Good night, old sport… Good night.”

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Excerpt from Chapter Three” The Great Gatsby, 1925. https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html Public Domain.

Film Trailers and New York Times Reviews

After reading the excerpt from  The Great Gatsby , watch these four film trailers. If you choose to take a New Historicism approach, you should use the 1926 version. For a cultural studies approach, please choose two trailers/reviews from the 1949, 1974, and 2013 versions.

1926 Version

Review: Hall, Mordaunt. “Gold and Cocktails.” The New York Times. November 22, 1926. https://www.nytimes.com/1926/11/22/archives/gold-and-cocktails.html

1949 Version

Review: Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen in Review: ‘The Great Gatsby,’ Based on the Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Opens at the Paramount.”  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/1949/07/14/archives/the-screen-in-review-the-great-gatsby-based-on-novel-of-f-scott.htm l

1974 Version

Review: Canby, Vincent. “A Lavish ‘Gatsby’ Loses the Book’s Spirit.”  The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/28/archives/a-lavish-gatsby-loses-book-s-spirit.html%20%0d2013

2013 Version

Review: Scott, A.O. “Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle.”  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/movies/the-great-gatsby-interpreted-by-baz-luhrmann.html

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You are here, engl 300: introduction to theory of literature,  - the new historicism.

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

Does history have lessons for the future? Roman Krznaric looks to the past to discover the rules for radical hope

Emeritus professor, History, The University of Melbourne

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Answers to the question about the lessons of history generally oscillate between two extremes. One is summed up in the 1905 aphorism of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana : “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The other is the famous opening to the English novelist L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

Can we draw direct lessons from history, or was the past so different as to tell us little about current challenges and their solutions? Most commonly, historians assert the uniqueness of past events while insisting that an historical perspective – evidence-based, thorough, sceptical, holistic – results in richer cultural awareness and wiser public policy.

Recently, more than 30 historians contributed to a collection titled Lessons from History: Leading Historians Tackle Australia’s Greatest Challenges , edited by Carolyn Holbrook, Lyndon Megarrity and David Lowe from the Australian Policy and History Network . They argued compellingly for the lessons to be learned from key moments in Australian history, and for how closer knowledge of the successes and failures of that history would produce better policy in future.

History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity – Roman Krznaric (W.H. Allen)

Roman Krznaric’s latest book, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity , is a far bolder version of this approach. He explores what we can learn from the last 1,000 years of global history to tackle urgent issues ranging from the climate crisis to the risks of artificial intelligence.

Born and raised in Sydney, Krznaric is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Eudaimonia is a Greek word, meaning “good spirit” or happiness, that was used by Aristotle to identify the highest human experience of wellbeing.

Krznaric’s books emphasise the capacity of ideas to create practical change and the social consequences of long-term thinking and focused empathy. Among them, The Good Ancestor and Empathy , in particular, have been celebrated and republished across the globe.

His new book’s ten chapters range across most of the dimensions of what Krznaric describes as today’s “permacrisis”. This crisis extends to the use of fossil fuels, the dangers of eugenics, threats to water supplies, social media and artificial intelligence, the need for regenerative economics, and the future of democracy, equality and tolerance.

What is genuinely distinctive about the book is Krznaric’s way of responding to these crises. He does not turn to the past simply for an explanation of their historical roots, but to find examples from the past 1,000 years of innovative social actions that might suggest ways of responding.

There are constant surprises. His chapter on tolerance, for example, draws on the lessons of the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus of 1000CE, 19th-century Chinese immigration to the United States, and contemporary Ghana. Violent Caribbean slave revolts in the 18th century and the direct action of suffragettes in the 20th century offer him justification for the most militant tactics of Extinction Rebellion : his argument is that only such “radical flank” actions ultimately achieve fundamental change.

At other times, Krznaric’s solutions are attractive but idealistic. He advocates subscription-based social media platforms with paid moderators as a solution to the excesses of social media, and even coffee shops with “Menus of Conversation” on the tables.

Krznaric is not starry-eyed about the past. He is well aware that history is littered with disasters and is by no means a linear progression towards improvement. “Human history is strewn with tragedies,” he admits: “wars broke out, people starved, exploitation reigned, societies crumbled.” Notably absent from his bibliography is Steven Pinker and his panegyrics to human progress, such as The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress .

Very often, sweeping surveys such as Pinker’s crumble under the weight of their simplifications of the lessons of history. The claims made about specific historical episodes are so skewed or inaccurate as to call into question the whole edifice of the argument. In contrast, one of the striking aspects of Krznaric’s work is the detailed and mostly convincing understanding he evinces of his historical examples.

The breadth of his research is startling, and he is a careful scholar for the most part – but not always. Many of his historical examples, while always fascinating and thought-provoking, are highly selective. In his chapter “Finntopia: How Finland Went from Economic Backwater to Egalitarian Showcase”, for example, he argues that Finland’s deserved reputation as an exemplar of progressive egalitarianism, especially in education, was solely the result of women’s strong political participation. He fails to mention Finland’s natural advantages in mining, forestry and chemical reserves that form the bedrock of its affluence.

A self-fulfilling prophecy?

What is most arresting – and controversial – in Krznaric’s analysis is his dismissal of representative democracy as “no longer fit for purpose”. He dismisses liberal representative democracies, with their multi-chamber parliaments and separation of powers, as simply a way of stifling the popular voice.

His model of genuine and effective democracy is citizens’ assemblies, chosen by lot if necessary, with genuine power rather than their usual advisory function. Krznaric’s fundamental belief is that, if invested with power and the necessary information, such assemblies will make the most responsible decisions.

Some would argue that here Krznaric slides into self-fulfilling prophecy. One of his examples is a citizens’ assembly in Ireland on the challenges of climate change for biodiversity. He was profoundly impressed with the way the 100 or so participants found their way to well-informed, radical conclusions. He agreed with those conclusions – but he had also played a major role in briefing the participants.

Krznaric is a remarkably productive writer – he has published seven substantial books in the past 12 years – and at times his conclusions are hasty and sweeping. He is aware that 18th-century revolutionaries in America and France were mostly wary of unlimited democracy, preferring the balance of upper houses based on property. But his assertion that they were determined “to filter out the voice of the demos , the people” is wrong.

He ignores the modern world’s first experience of universal suffrage for men in a single house of parliament in the French Republic in 1792–95. Nor does he dwell on citizens’ assemblies that came to the “wrong” conclusions.

For example, Emmanuel Macron organised advisory nation-wide citizens’ assemblies after the gilets jaunes protests of 2018–19. These turned into pointless talkfests. Their failure was less a result of their lack of power than their becoming occasions for voicing contradictory demands for lower taxes, higher social security payments and cheaper petrol. Similarly, lively citizens’ assemblies in regional Queensland are currently contesting renewable energy projects as ugly, unnecessary intrusions on farmland.

Such examples should not detract from ways in which such local assemblies may make significant, inclusive and farsighted community-based decisions. There are plenty of “co-design” projects that have effectively involved local users and stakeholders from the beginning of a project through to its implementation. This may be as simple as a small coastal community handling the parking needs of daytrippers, or as complex as a tourist town managing the proliferation of short-stay accommodation.

The difference, of course, is the scale of the polity. When can local assemblies best decide for themselves, and about what? Are regional, national and international issues always best handled by representative, elected bodies?

Krznaric acknowledges that the most radical actions to avert potential collapses of entire societies have been by national governments: the US response to Pearl Harbour in 1941, for example, or the Dutch government’s Delta Works program following devastating floods in 1953, or even some governments’ responses to the COVID pandemic.

The French revolutionaries who grappled with the modern world’s first great attempt to create mass democratic structures were steeped in the classics they had studied at school. They were all too aware of the contrasts between small Greek and Roman city-states and a large nation like France. They fought over the issue of direct or participatory democracy, and over the idea of representatives being simply the people’s mandatories.

In his most important speech, On Political Morality , delivered on February 5 1794, Maximilien Robespierre put it like this:

Democracy is not a state in which the whole people, continually assembled, itself rules on all public business, still less is it one in which a hundred thousand factions of the people decide, by unrelated, hasty, and contradictory measures, on the fate of the entire society; such a government has never existed, and it could exist only to lead the people back to despotism. Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, itself does all it can do well, and through delegates all it cannot do itself.

Like other sweeping surveys of the past made to prove a thesis – from Pinker to John Pilger to Francis Fukuyama – Krznaric’s historical examples are often too selective or questionable to be fully convincing. History for Tomorrow is, nevertheless, invaluable for two reasons. One is its breadth and range across time; it is an inspiring and often surprising read. The other is where Krznaric ends up. His “five reasons for radical hope” seem incontrovertible:

Disruptive movements can change the system.

“We” can prevail over “me”.

There are alternatives to capitalism.

Humans are social innovators.

Other futures are possible.

Krznaric’s great achievement in this book is that he prompts us to consider how changes to decision-making in complex societies with overlapping structures of government and administration might result in some issues being resolved more democratically and promptly. His expansive grasp of human history enables him to stud his book with engrossing examples of where this has proved to be possible. History for Tomorrow is a superb example of the capacity of the humanities and social sciences to reflect on the lessons of the past, without being despairing or simplistic.

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• The real problem with China’s economy

The country risks making some of the mistakes the Soviet Union did

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C hina’S giant economy faces an equally giant crisis of confidence—and a growing deficit of accurate information is only making things worse. Even as the country wrestles with a property crash, the services sector slowed by one measure in August. Consumers are fed up. Multinational firms are taking money out of China at a record pace and foreign China-watchers are trimming their forecasts for economic growth.

The gloom reflects real problems, from half-built houses to bad debts. But it also reflects growing mistrust of information about China. The government is widely believed to be massaging data, suppressing sensitive facts and sometimes offering delusional prescriptions for the economy. This void feeds on itself: the more fragile the economy is, the more knowledge is suppressed and the more nerves fray. This is not just a cyclical problem of confidence . By backtracking on the decades-long policy of partially liberalising the flow of information, China will find it harder to complete its ambition of restructuring the economy around new industries. Like the Soviet Union, it risks instead becoming an example of how autocratic rule is not just illiberal but also inefficient.

The tightening of censorship under President Xi Jinping is well known. Social-media accounts are ever more strictly policed. Officials are warier of candid debate with outsiders. Scholars fear they are watched and business people mouth Communist Party slogans. Less familiar is the parallel disappearance of technical data, especially if it is awkward or embarrassing for the party. Figures for youth unemployment, a huge problem, have been “improved and optimised”—and lowered. Balance-of-payments statistics have become so murky that even America’s Treasury is baffled. On August 19th stock exchanges stopped publishing daily numbers on dwindling foreign-investment inflows. As the economic dashboard dims , the private sector is finding it harder to make good decisions. Officials probably are, too.

To understand the significance of this shift, look back to the mid-20th century. Witnessing the totalitarianism of the 1930s and 1940s, liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek argued that political freedom and economic success go hand in hand: decentralised power and information prevent tyranny and allow millions of firms and consumers to make better decisions and live better lives. The collapse of the Soviet Union proved them right. In order to maintain political dominance, its rulers ruthlessly controlled information. But that required brutal repression, starved the economy of price signals and created an edifice of lies. By the end, even the Soviet leadership was deprived of an accurate picture.

As China grew more open in the late 1990s and 2000s, its leaders hoped to maintain control while avoiding the Soviet Union’s mistakes. For many years they allowed technical information in business, the economy and science to flow far more freely. Think of Chinese firms with listed share prices disclosing information to investors in New York, or scientists sharing new research with groups abroad. Technology seemed to offer a more surgical way to censor mass opinion. The internet was intensively policed, but it was not banned.

China’s top leadership also redoubled its efforts to know what was going on. For decades, it has run a system known as neican , or internal reference, in which journalists and officials compile private reports. During the Tiananmen Square protests, for example, the leadership received constant updates. Techno-utopian party loyalists reckoned that big data and artificial intelligence could improve this system, creating a high-tech panopticon for the supreme leader that would allow the kind of enlightened central planning the Soviets failed at.

It is this vision of a partially open, hyper-efficient China that is now in doubt. Amid a widening culture of fear and a determination to put national security before the economy, the party has proved unable or unwilling to limit the scope of its interference in information flows. Monetary-policy documents and the annual reports of China’s mega-banks now invoke Xi Jinping Thought. Deadly-dull foreign management consultants are treated as spies. This is happening despite the fact that China’s increasingly sophisticated economy requires more fluid and complex decision-making.

An obvious result is the retreat of individual liberty. In a reversal of its partial opening, China has become a more repressive place . Many Chinese still have liberal views and enjoy debate but stick to private gatherings. They present no immediate danger to the party.

The information void’s other effects pose more of a threat. As price signals dim, the allocation of capital is getting harder. This comes at a delicate moment. As its workforce shrinks, China must rely more on boosting productivity to grow. That is all about using resources well. The country needs to pivot away from cheap credit and construction to innovative industries and supplying consumers. That is why capital spending is pouring into electric vehicles, semiconductors and more. Yet if investment is based on erroneous calculations of demand and supply, or if data on subsidies and profits are suppressed, then the odds of a successful transition are low.

China’s admirers might retort that the country’s key decision-makers still have good information with which to steer the economy. But nobody really knows what data and reports Mr Xi sees. Moreover, as the public square empties it is a good bet that the flow of private information is becoming more distorted and less subject to scrutiny. No one wants to sign a memo that says one of Mr Xi’s signature policies is failing.

After the horrors of the mid-20th century, liberal thinkers understood that free-flowing information improves decision-making, reduces the odds of grave mistakes and makes it easier for societies to evolve. But when information is suppressed, it turns into a source of power and corruption. Over time, the distortions and inefficiencies mount. China has big opportunities but it also faces immense problems. A fully informed citizenry, private sector and government would be far better equipped to take on the challenges ahead. ■

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This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “China’s looking-glass economy”

Leaders September 7th 2024

What to do about america’s killer cars, the labour government’s worrying lack of ambition in europe, how to deal with the hard-right threat in germany, a make-or-break moment for mexico, as brazil bans elon musk’s x, who will speak up for free speech.

From the September 7th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

More from Leaders

Sir Keir Starmer is trapped by the mindset of the post-Brexit years

In America’s biggest trading partner the rule of law and democracy are under attack

The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous as the rich-world average. It doesn’t have to be that way

As extremists win more votes across Europe, forming moderate and effective governments is getting harder

Free expression has become a culture war, and those who should defend it are staying quiet

Digital twins are fast becoming part of everyday life

Welcome to the mirror world

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › New Criticism

New Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 30, 2021

New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional “extrinsic” approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical phenomena. New Criticism holds that a text must be evaluated apart from its context; failure to do so causes the Affective Fallacy , which confuses a text with the emotional or psychological response of its readers, or the Intentional Fallacy, which conflates textual impact and the objectives of the author.

New Criticism assumes that a text is an isolated entity that can be understood through the tools and techniques of close reading, maintains that each text has unique texture, and asserts that what a text says and how it says it are inseparable. The task of the New Critic is to show the way a reader can take the myriad and apparently discordant elements of a text and reconcile or resolve them into a harmonious, thematic whole. In sum, the objective is to unify the text or rather to recognize the inherent but obscured unity therein. The reader’s awareness of and attention to elements of the form of the work mean that a text eventually will yield to the analytical scrutiny and interpretive pressure that close reading provides. Simply put, close reading is the hallmark of New Criticism.

The genesis of New Criticism can be found in the early years of the 20th century in the work of the British philosopher I. A. Richards and his student William Empson. Another important fi gure in the beginnings of New Criticism was the American writer and critic T. S. Eliot . Later practitioners and proponents include John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Reni Wellek, and William Wimsatt. In many ways New Criticism runs in temporal parallel to the American modern period.

I. A. Richards

From the 1930s to the 1960s in the United States, New Criticism was the accepted approach to literary study and criticism in scholarly journals and in college and university English departments. Among the lasting legacies of New Criticism is the conviction that surface reading of literature is insufficient; a critic, to arrive at and make sense of the latent potency of a text, must explore very carefully its inner sanctum by noting the presence and the patterns of literary devices within the text. Only this, New Criticism asserts, enables one to decode completely.

New Criticism gave discipline and depth to literary scholarship through emphasis on the text and a close reading thereof. However, the analytic and interpretive moves made in the practice of New Criticism tend to be most effective in lyric and complex intellectual poetry. The inability to deal adequately with other kinds of texts proved to be a significant liability in this approach. Furthermore, the exclusion of writer, reader, and context from scholarly inquiry has made New Criticism vulnerable to serious objections.

Despite its radical origins, New Criticism was fundamentally a conservative enterprise. By the 1960s, its dominance began to erode, and eventually it ceded primacy to critical approaches that demanded examination of the realities of production and reception. Today, although New Criticism has few champions, in many respects it remains an approach to literature from which other critical modes depart or against which they militate.

New Criticism: An Essay

The New Criticism of JC Ransom

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Guerin, Wilfred, et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Jancovich, Mark. The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Ransom, John. The New Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1941. Spurland, William, and Michael Fischer, eds. The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities. New York: Garland, 1995. Willingham, John. “The New Criticism: Then and Now.” In Contemporary Literary Theory, edited by Douglas Atkins and Janice Morrow, 24–41. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

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Categories: Literature , Textual Criticism

Tags: African Literature , American New Criticism , Key points of New Criticism , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , New Criticism , New Criticism essay , New Criticism in US , New Criticism main points , New Criticism major concepts , New Critics , Practitioners of New Criticism , theories of New Criticism

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Katherine Miller

The Normalization of American Politics’ Rapid Descent Into Violence

By Katherine Miller

Ms. Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.

On the convention stage, Donald Trump said he would talk about the assassination attempt only once. Understandably, he has continued to talk about it, as many people do when shocking things happen to them.

“I’m not nicer,” he told donors on Aug. 2, rebutting the idea that he’d mellowed in the aftermath. At rallies outdoors, he now stands behind bulletproof glass onstage. At a rally in Michigan recently, he said he’s been treated worse than various presidents, adding, “I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”

Mr. Trump told The Daily Mail that he’s had no flashbacks or nightmares. Asked by the interviewer whether he thought he might have post-traumatic stress disorder or consider counseling, Mr. Trump said: “A couple of people have asked me that, and I have had no impact. It’s just amazing.” He went on to say that he didn’t think about the shooting much and did not want to.

In a livestream on X, Elon Musk opened with the assassination attempt, asking, “What was it like for you?”

“Not pleasant,” Mr. Trump replied and Mr. Musk laughed. Then Mr. Trump talked in much detail about the things that did happen and could have happened. Across more than 10 minutes, it seemed like Mr. Trump had consumed a lot of information about that day in Butler, Pa. He described different perspectives and footage: video of a woman who saw the shooter, the view of the crowd control experts, the local police officer who’d climbed up to the roof, his Secret Service detail who piled on top of him, and the sniper who killed the shooter. “He’s been with them for 23 years, and he’s never had anything like this, and all of the sudden he has to act,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a very tough thing to act and to be shooting somebody.”

“The bigger miracle is that I was looking in the exact direction of the shooter,” Mr. Trump said, “so it hit me at an angle that was far less destructive, so that was the miracle.” It’s actually a striking description of what happened: to be looking at and unable to see a source of imminent danger.

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