The Big Names in New Historicism
New Historicism didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Early New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher were inspired by three theorists: Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, and Raymond Williams.
And who were these guys?
- Foucault was a bald, bespectacled French theorist who wrote a lot about “discourse” and all the different things it could mean and ways it was related to power.
- Clifford Geertz was an anthropologist who spent a lot of time in cool places like Bali, Indonesia studying cockfights (and no doubt also hanging out on the beach). Geertz’s big idea was that culture should be analyzed like a text.
- Raymond Williams was a Marxist critic who was one of the first to look really closely at the relationship between literature and broader socio-economic issues like class and politics.
Now that you’re experts on these three really important figures in twentieth-century intellectual history, you can understand why New Historicism only really took off when Stephen Greenblatt and his buddies came along and snatched up Foucault, Geertz, and Williams’ ideas and applied them in new ways.
More on that soon, but first—we can’t speak about New Historicism without speaking about Greenblatt. His 1980 book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, is the book that kick-started the New Historicism craze. Greenblatt insisted that we can’t understand English Renaissance writers like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe without understanding the historical context that shaped them and their work. That may seem pretty clear today, but it was kind of a big deal back in 1980.
Stevie was basically the leader of one main group within the field of New Historicism—the Renaissance clique, who focused on stuff by Shakespeare and other writers from around the 14th to the 17th century. He joined by other New Historicist scholars like Catherine Gallagher and Louis Adrian Montrose, who also focused on English Renaissance literature and showed how texts and contexts are related in this period.
The second important group of New Historicists focus on the Romantic period. Scholars like Marjorie Levinson and Jerome McGann study the “big” Romantic poets—William Wordsworth, John Keats, and George Gordon (more commonly called “Lord”) Byron among others—to show that beneath all the flowers and trees and gardens we find in Romantic poetry, there’s also a lot of politics and class and social issues going on.