taken from Chapter 9 Beginning Theory by Peter Barry NEW HISTORICISM taken from Chapter 9 Beginning Theory by Peter Barry

Definition New Historicism: a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period.

Old&NEW historicism New Historicism: giving ‘equal weighting’ to literary and non-literary material. Old Historicism: regarding the literary text as the object of value, and the history as the ‘background’.

Old&NEW historicism New Historicism: interested in history as represented and recorded in written documents, in history-as-text. Old Historicism: viewed the events in history as the setting.

TEXTS:

What new historicist do They juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the former in the light of the latter. They try thereby to ‘defamiliarise’ the canonical literary text, detaching it from the accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new.

They focus attention (within both text and co-text) on issues of State power and how it is maintained, on patriarchal structures and their perpetuation, and on the process of colonisation, with its accompanying ‘mind-set’.

They make use, in doing so, of aspects of the post-structuralist outlook, especially Derrida’s notion that every facet of reality is textualised, and Foucault’s idea of social structures as determined by dominant ‘discursive practices’.

Sample research Louis Montrose’s essay: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form” M. Noor Rizal’s skripsi: “Konsep Politik dan Ekonomi dalam Karya Prosa John Winthrop”

Louis Montrose

M. Noor Rizal In John Winthrop’s prose works, there are depictions of ideal political and economic based on what is predestined and written in the Bible. The object of this research is a sermon, essay and journal written by John Winthrop before and after he arrived at the New World. The aim of this research is to describe the characteristics of the ideal concept of political institution which Winthrop envisioned and the reason why the concept is carried on his writings by observing the textual features like metaphors and analogies when John Winthrop describes the ideal concept. To study this problem, this research employs the New Historicism approach, historical context of America to be compared which is taken from several sources as well as theories of American Orientalism proposed by Fuad Sha’ban. The textual features which build the depiction of the ideal concept are juxtaposed with the political and economic condition as the context of that era and connected to the ideal concept’s orientalism.