Néo-historicisme

New historicism, a form of literary theory which aims to understand intellectual history through literature and literature through its cultural context, follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of cultural poetics. It first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. Greenblatt coined the term new historicism when he "collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, he wrote that the essays represented something called a 'new historicism'". Harold Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989), noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in new historicism: that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices; that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes; that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably; that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature; that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe. "Sub-literary" texts and uninspired non-literary texts all came to be read as documents of historical discourse, side-by-side with the "great works of literature". A typical focus of new historicist critics, led by Stephen Orgel, has been on understanding Shakespeare less as an autonomous great author in the modern sense than as a means of reconstructing the cultural milieu of Renaissance theatre—a collaborative and largely anonymous free-for-all—and the complex social politics of the time. In this sense, Shakespeare's plays are seen as inseparable from the context in which he wrote (see contextualism, thick description). Influential historians behind the eruption of the new historicism are Lynn Hunt and Michel Foucault, as they both taught at UC-Berkeley during its rise as a postmodern approach to history.