New Historicism
Open Yale Courses http://oyc.yale.edu/transcript/469/engl-300
ENGL-300: INTRODUCTION TO
THEORY OF LITERATURE
Lecture 19 - The New Historicism [March 31, 2009]
Chapter 1. Origins of New Historicism [00:00:00]
Professor Paul Fry: So today we turn to a mode of doing literary criticism which was extraordinarily widespread beginning in the late seventies and into the eighties, called the New Historicism. It was definable in ways that I'll turn to in a minute and, as I say, prevalent to a remarkable degree everywhere.
It began probably at the University of California at Berkeley under the auspices, in part, of Stephen
Greenblatt, whose brief essay you've read for today. Greenblatt and others founded a journal, still one of the most important and influential journals in the field of literary study, calledRepresentations--always has been and still is an organ for New Historicist thought. It's a movement which began primarily preoccupied with the Early Modern period, the so-called "Renaissance." The New Historicism is, in effect, responsible for the replacement of the term "Renaissance" with the term "Early Modern."
Its influence, however, quickly did extend to other fields, some fields perhaps more than others. It would be, I think, probably worth a lecture that I'm not going to give to explain why certain fields somehow or another seem to lend themselves more readily to New Historicist approaches than others. I think it's fair to say that in addition to the early modern period, the three fields that have been most influenced by the New Historicism are the eighteenth century, British Romanticism, and Americanist studies from the late colonial through the republican period. That age--the emergence of print culture, the emergence of the public sphere as a medium of influence, and the distribution of knowledge in the
United States--has been very fruitfully studied from New Historicist points of view. So those are the fields that are most directly
ENGL-300: INTRODUCTION TO
THEORY OF LITERATURE
Lecture 19 - The New Historicism [March 31, 2009]
Chapter 1. Origins of New Historicism [00:00:00]
Professor Paul Fry: So today we turn to a mode of doing literary criticism which was extraordinarily widespread beginning in the late seventies and into the eighties, called the New Historicism. It was definable in ways that I'll turn to in a minute and, as I say, prevalent to a remarkable degree everywhere.
It began probably at the University of California at Berkeley under the auspices, in part, of Stephen
Greenblatt, whose brief essay you've read for today. Greenblatt and others founded a journal, still one of the most important and influential journals in the field of literary study, calledRepresentations--always has been and still is an organ for New Historicist thought. It's a movement which began primarily preoccupied with the Early Modern period, the so-called "Renaissance." The New Historicism is, in effect, responsible for the replacement of the term "Renaissance" with the term "Early Modern."
Its influence, however, quickly did extend to other fields, some fields perhaps more than others. It would be, I think, probably worth a lecture that I'm not going to give to explain why certain fields somehow or another seem to lend themselves more readily to New Historicist approaches than others. I think it's fair to say that in addition to the early modern period, the three fields that have been most influenced by the New Historicism are the eighteenth century, British Romanticism, and Americanist studies from the late colonial through the republican period. That age--the emergence of print culture, the emergence of the public sphere as a medium of influence, and the distribution of knowledge in the
United States--has been very fruitfully studied from New Historicist points of view. So those are the fields that are most directly