New Historicism

About: New Historicism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 892 publications have been published within this topic receiving 13681 citations.

Modernity versus Postmodernity

Abstract: Last year, architects were admitted to the Biennial in Venice, following painters and filmmakers. The note sounded at this first Architecture Biennial was o'he of disappointment. I would describe it by saying that those who exhibited in Venice formed an avant-garde of reversed fronts. I mean that they sacrificed the tradition of modernity in order to make room for a new historicism. Upon this occasion, a critic of the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, advanced a thesis whose significance reaches beyond this particular event; it is a diagnosis of our times: "Postmodernity definitely presents itself as Antimodernity." This statement describes an emotional current of our times which has penetrated all spheres of intellectual life. It has placed on the agenda theories of post-enlightenment, postmodernity, even of posthistory. From history we know the phrase:

Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England

Abstract: The author has been at the centre of a shift in literary interpretation towards a critical method that places cultural creation in historical context. This book exemplifies the method in an examination of how collective beliefs and experiences are shaped, transferred from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable form, and offered to the public on the stage. As well as providing a new way of understanding Shakespeare, the book is an original analysis of a cultural process. The first chapter introduces the methods and purposes of the new historicism, and later chapters consider the types of cultural negotiation that shape the four main genres of Shakespearean drama: history, comedy, tragedy and romance. Particular reference is made to "Henry IV", "Henry V", "Twelth Night", "King Lear" and "The Tempest", and the book includes analyses of such aspects of early modern culture as exorcism, cross-dressing, colonial propaganda and martial law codes.

The Western canon : the books and school of the ages

Abstract: Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of the aesthetic, " Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon. Shakespeare has become the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, whether playwrights poets or storytellers. In the creation of character, Bloom maintains, Shakespeare has no true precursor and has left no one after him untouched. Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; and Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, Proust, the modern Hispanic and Portuguese writers Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. Bloom concludes this provocative, trenchant work with a complete list of essential writers and books - his vision of the Canon.

Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian

Abstract: When Nero took the stage, the audience played along - or else. The drama thus enacted, whether in the theatre proper or in the political arena, unfolds in all its complexity in "Actors in the Audience". This is a book about language, theatricality and empire - about how the Roman emperor dramatized his rule and how his subordinates in turn staged their response. The focus is on Nero: his performances onstage spurred his contemporaries to reflect on the nature of power and representation, and to make the stage a paradigm for larger questions about the theatricality of power. Through these portrayals by ancient writers, Shadi Bartsch explores what happens to language and representation when all discourse is distorted by the pull of an autocratic authority. Some Roman senators, forced to become actors and dissimulators under the scrutinizing eye of the ruler, portrayed themselves and their class as the victims of regimes that are, to the modern eye, redolent of Stalinism. Other writers claimed that doublespeak - saying one thing and meaning two - was the way one could, and did, undo the constraining effects of imperial oppression. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal all figure in Bartsch's shrewd analysis of historical and literary responses to the brute facts of empire; even the "Panegyricus" of Pliny the Younger now appears as a reaction against the widespread awareness of dissimulation. Informed by theories of dramaturgy, sociology, new historicism and cultural criticism, this close reading of literary and historical texts gives us a new perspective on the politics of the Roman Empire, and on the languages and representation of power.