New Historicism

The literary and cultural historical method that reads literary texts not as autonomous aesthetic objects but as participants in the power relations and cultural practices of their historical moment.

Against formalism and old historicism: New Criticism read texts in isolation; old historicism used history as background context. New Historicism (Greenblatt): texts and non-literary documents circulate in the same cultural field — power, ideology, and resistance operate through both. The anecdote as methodology: begin with a strange historical detail and trace how it illuminates the culture that produced the literary work. Foucauldian genealogy applied to literary history: texts don't reflect culture, they constitute it. Shakespeare is not a timeless genius but a historical agent producing and negotiating the power relations of Elizabethan England.