Review from Resonance and Wonder
"The aesthetic wonder that texts arouse as well as their historical resonance". Greenblatt named the New Historicism which is an interest in the embeddedness of cultural objects in the contingencies of history. It is a distictive literary criticism from the traditional historicism, which opposite to the formalism and structuralism. The theory is a culturally poetic study on explaining the literature relates to history and politics. Another word, he emphasizes on the interaction of reality and history and politics, rather than thinking the history as just an event under a certain time.
New historicism is different from the others like marxism as a doctrine, instead, it is more like a practice. First, the literature is a historic reflection which needs to be studied and researched on its historic characters and events. Secondly, it is also important to study the author because the author would be varied on characteristics, different times and environments. Thirdly, it is no necessary restoring in the traditional historicism---- to discover the affection of history on the context, while the context reflects the history.
To conclude, according to his theory, the literature reflects the past and the present while the reality is led or affected by the literature---- "the touch of the real"---- re-creating the social and cultural negotiations of a historical moment.
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