New historicism and cultural materialism Summary and Analysis

Stephen Greenblatt uses "new historicism" in 1980 to mean giving equal significance to reading literary and non-literary texts from the same period. The literary text receives no special treatment over non-literary texts about the same historical period. For example, Greenblatt's new historicism typically uses an historical document, called "anecdote" to introduce historicist essays rather than prior academic work. The essential difference between new and old historicism is parallel study of "equal weighting." Old historicism highlights a literary text as focus of an historical text as merely background setting. New historicism treats both literary and historical texts with equal importance. Secondly, new historicism stresses the archive value of "history-as-text." The historical event is past and only its writing remains. History writing, according to new historicism is subject to close analysis just like literary writing.

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