1. The context is the text, man
New Historicism
The context is the text, man

2. A Modern School of Thought
New Historicism originated in the 1980s and 1990s through Harvard English Professor Stephen Greenblatt.

3. The New Historicism lens says that the context around a text is the best gateway into interpreting it.
Context includes:
The time period in which the text was produced
The cultural and political environment at the time the text was produced
The biography of the text’s author
The biography of the text’s critic (in other words, me)

4. This means that New Historicism is a multi-disciplinary lens
This means that New Historicism is a multi-disciplinary lens. New Historicists are literary historians, using history, economics, sociology, anthropology and any other –ology they can find to try to understand a text.
(Kinda like what you all did to figure out whether or not the X-Men are human.)

5. Look how some typical questions New Historicists asks of a text take context into account:
What language/characters/events in the work reflect the current events of the author’s day?
How are events' interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the author?
How does this portrayal criticize the leading political figures or movements of the day?
How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations?
How does the text connect to other historical or cultural texts from that same time period?

6. New Historicism & God Loves, Man Kills

7. Let’s start with the author:
Chris Claremont has one of the most storied careers in all of Marvel history, but is especially known for his work on X-Men.
Turned Wolverine into the popular character he is today
Created famous female X-Men like Rogue, Psylocke, Ariel/Kitty Pryde, Emma Frost and others
Wrote important story lines like “The Dark Phoenix Saga”, “GL, MK”, and added new depth to Magneto’s backstory

8. Remember, New Historicism considers the author’s biography an important part of the text
Claremont was born in 1950 in London, but moved to Long Island, New York when he was young
This means Claremont’s formative years were spent surrounded by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950 to 1970s, the Stonewall Riots in the 1960s and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
Claremont’s mother was Jewish (which made him Jewish) and he even lived for a time in Israel

9. The influence of 1960s to 1980s culture seeps through the pages of God Loves, Man Kills, which Marvel published in 1982:
From left to right: allusions to the lynchings of African-Americans and racial violence, the outcasting of homosexuals and the Holocaust.

10. But Claremont’s main inspiration:

11. Televangelists: Ministers (whether official or self-proclaimed) who broadcast their sermons to large audiences
Began with radio in 1920s
Moves to television in the 1950s
By the 1980s televangelism’s popularity rose exponentially, making Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson household names
Some even created their own television networks and began shaping conservative political thought
One of today’s most well-known televangelists is Joel Osteen

12. “So here we are in the early 1980s…the country was returning to bedrock, traditional values and beliefs, both political and moral. Leading that charge…were a coterie of TV evangelists…in the Marvel universe mutants have always stood as a metaphor for the underclass, the outsiders; they represent the ultimate minority…For me, this story grew out of a time where voices of casual intolerance were very much abroad in the land…” – Chris Claremont, from the introduction to God Loves, Man Kills

13. New Historicism & The X-Men

14. Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber) and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) created the X-Men in 1963

15. Two first-generation Jewish guys in New York created a world about social outcasts fighting for peace and acceptance

16. And don’t forget the history the critic brings to the text
The critic is a Jewish-American male with eastern European immigrant ancestors. He grew up very much engaged with Jewish culture: he went to temple, Hebrew school, and went to and worked for a Jewish camp.
From an early age he identified with Magneto
His progressive values may make him read into the text a little too deeply looking for connections to real world problems

17. Conclusions
New Historicism asks the critics to examine the X-Men within the context of the times. In doing this, X-Men stories always change, as the allegory of mutants living as outcasts from society changes depending on which group of people happens to be “the other” at the time
X-Men’s decades of popularity results in the shifting of society: there will always be people like the critic who see a bit of themselves in the X-Men
Due to this, there is no one meaning to the text – the X- Men’s characters and stories are only what the reader brings to them, and how they reflect an ever-changing society
Without New Historicism, GL,MK may not have the emotional resonance it has because we don’t connect it to the social unrest at the time

18. Works Cited