Abstract
The new historicism is, first of all, new: one of the most recent developments in contemporary theory, it is still evolving. Enough of its contours have come into focus for us to realize that it exists and deserves a name, but any definition of the new historicism is bound to be somewhat fuzzy, like a partially developed photographic image. Some individual critics that we may label new historicist may also be deconstructors, or feminists, or Marxists. Some would deny that the others are even writing the new kind of historical criticism.
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The New Historicism: A Selected Bibliography
The New Historicism: Further Reading
Graff, Gerald, and Gerald Gibbons, eds. Criticism in the University. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985. This volume, which contains Hirsch’s essay, “Back to History,” in the section entitled “Pedagogy and Polemics,” also includes sections devoted to the historical backgrounds of academic criticism; the influence of Marxism, feminism, and critical theory in general on the new historicism; and varieties of “cultural criticism.”
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. “Back to History.” Graff and Gibbons 189–97.
History and … Special issue, New Literary History 21 (1990). See especially the essays by Carolyn Porter, Rena Fraden, Clifford Geertz, and Renato Rosaldo.
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.
Thomas, Brook. “The Historical Necessity for — and Difficulties with — New Historical Analysis in Introductory Literature Courses.” College English 49 (1987): 509–22.
—. The New Historicism and Other Old-Tashioned Topics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
—. “Walter Benn Michaels and the New Historicism: Where’s the Difference?” Boundary 2 18 (1991): 118–59.
Veeser, Harold, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989.
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’Conner. New York: Methuen, 1987. 47–67.
The New Historicism: Influential Examples
New Historicism has taken its present form less through the elaboration of basic theoretical postulates and more through certain influential examples. The works listed represent some of the most important contributions guiding research in this area.
American Literary History. A journal devoted to new historicist and cultural criticism; the first issue was Spring 1989. New York: Oxford UP.
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power 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. See especially the essays by Dollimore, Greenblatt, and Tennenhouse.
Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. See ch. 1 and the chapter on Othello entitled “The Improvisation of Power.”
—. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. See especially “The Circulation of Social Energy” and “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V.”
Marcus, Leah. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
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.
Representations. This quarterly journal, printed by the University of California Press, regularly publishes new historicist studies and cultural criticism.
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 and London: Methuen, 1986.
Foucault and His Influence
As I point out in the introduction to the new historicism, some new historicists would question the “privileging” of Foucault implicit in this section heading (“Foucault and His Influence”) and the following one (“Other Writers and Works”). They might cite the greater importance of one of these other writers or point out that to cite a central influence or a definitive cause runs against the very spirit of the movement.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper, 1972.
—. Discipline and Punish. 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. 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.
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: Tour 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.” [1936J Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
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.
New Historicist Approaches to Swift and Gulliver’s Travels
Bellamy, Liz. Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
Brown, Laura. “Reading Race and Gender: Jonathan Swift.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990): 424–43.
Deane, Seamus. “Swift and the Anglo-Irish Intellect.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1986): 9–22.
Fabricant, Carole. “The Battle of the Ancients and (Post) Moderns: Rethinking Swift through Contemporary Perspectives.” The Eighteenth Century 32 (1991): 256–73.
—. Swift’s Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
McKeon, Michael. “Parables of the younger son (I): Swift and the Containment of Desire.” The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. 338–56.
Said, Edward. “Swift as Intellectual.” The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. 72–89.
Works Cited
Adams, Percy G. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Trans. Avital Ronell. On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 51–77.
Francis, Bishop of Down and Connor. A Defence of the Antient Historians: With a Particular Application of it to the History of Ireland. Dublin, 1734.
Glover, Thomas. “An Account of Virginia.” Philosophical Transactions: Giving Some Accompt of the Present Undertakings, Studies and Labours of the Ingenious in any Considerable Parts of the World. Vol. XI. London: Royal Society, 1676. 623ff.
Holly, Grant. “Travel and Translation: Textuality in Gulliver’s Travels.” Criticism 21 (1979): 134–52.
Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton, 1990.
Keating, Geoffrey. The General History of Ireland. Trans. Dermod O’Connor. London, 1732.
Marx, Karl. Marx’s Grundrisse. Ed. David McLellan. London: Macmillan, 1980.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Ed. S. Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress, 1964.
Raymond, Anthony. A Short Preliminary Discourse to the History of Ireland. London, 1725.
Reiss, Timothy J. The Discourse of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
Smith, Frederik N., ed. The Genres of “Gulliver’s Travels.” Newark: U of Delaware P, 1990.
Swift, Jonathan. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift. 5 vols. Ed. Harold Williams. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963–65.
—. The Poems of Jonathan Swift. 3 vols. Ed. Harold Williams. Oxford: Clarendon, 1958.
—. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. 14 vols. Ed. Herbert Davis et al. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–68.
Todd, Dennis. “The Hairy Maid at the Harpsichord: Some Speculations on the Meaning of Gullivers Travels.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 239–83.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper, 1984.
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Swift, J. (1995). The New Historicism and Gulliver’s Travels. In: Fox, C. (eds) Gulliver’s Travels. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12357-2_5
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