1. Historicism/New HistoricismBy
S.Sajeev

2. What is history? Two meanings: The events of the past.
Telling a story about the events of the past.

3. Historicism General/Popular perspective of history Deceiving/Cheating
History constructs literature
Literature is not a part of discourse

4. Historicism Cultural and Social
Texts are unified one (Political, Social, cultural)
Previously it was seen in isolation until 19th c.
Non-literary texts are used in contexts/ situations

5. Historicism
Non-literary texts, such as letters, journals, autobiographies, memoirs, travelogues are treated as secondary or viewed as background for the literary texts.
It is situated in the past. (Opposite of anachronism)

6. Examples of Historicism
E.M.W Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture(1943)
Shakespeare's History Plays (1944)
Hudson’s Social History of England

7. Examples of Historicism
Construction of Virgin Queen/ Selvi J. J
In “Shaping fantasis” by Louis Montrose
Cleopatra’s relationship
Shakespeare’s writing

8. New Historicism Began in 1980s, American,
Cultural Materialism in England
Coined by American critic Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980)
Later preferred the term ‘Cultural Poetics’

9. New Historicism A mixture of Marxist and poststructralist orientations
Def:
The work of art is the product of a negotiation between a creator or class or creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of Society.
Greenblatt

10. New Historicism Non-literary texts are treated as co-texts
Focusing on unpopular version of history
The aim:
Not finding the truth rather re-situating the past

11. New Historicism Literary texts construct history/power Equal weighting
History as text , events are irrecoverably lost, therefore ‘anecdote’ , lived experience
Louis Montrose’s essay, I would like to recount an Elizabethan dream – not Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream but one dreamt by Simon Forman on 23 January 1597.

12. Examples
Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton’s collection of essays New Historicism and Renaissance Drama
The age of confinement, Puritan attack on canrival, slavery,
The rise of Patriarchy
Museum
Indian independence
Virgin queen as the most flirtatious woman of all women
Louis Montrose in “Shaping fantasies” in 1983
Who discovered India?

13. New Historicism Entrapment/ pessimistic – Mitchell Foucault
Focus on discourse and power.
‘Invisible Bullets’ in 1980
Subversiveness is the very product of that power and furthers its end. Greenblatt.

14. New Historicism Hegemony or dominant ideology- Antonio Gramsci
Jeremy Bentham – Panopticon - Omnipresence

15. New Historicism
Who was the most celebrated dramatist of the 16th century?
Mahmud of Ghazni

16. Thank you