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New historicism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s largely in reaction to the New Criticism and formalism of the 1950s that claimed to have evolved "an objective criticism of the literary text" with a view that text referred only to itself and to nothing outside. Their elaborate cutting off of the context/history from the text not only discredited biographical study but also undermined the social and cultural implications of the text as their chief concern was – how the work is made and not what the work says.

The popularity of new historicism as a literary theory has given rise to the publication of a good number of books and anthologies centred upon its theory and practice. Apart from the foundational books of Stephen Greenblatt and Michel Foucault, many scholars and critics have remarkably contributed to its consolidation in literary studies. Some of the famous books worth mentioning published in the last two decades include Practicing New Historicism (2001) written by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, The Authentic Shakespeare (2002) by Stephen Orgel, Stephen Greenblatt by Mark Robson, Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory : New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (2012) and Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory (2017) both by Neema Parvini. The former book of Parvini is more comprehensive in coverage than other available guides. It features a timeline of critical developments in new historicism and a glossary of theoretical terms. Parvini's Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory offers a more detailed scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of reading Shakespeare's plays. Richard Wilson's introductory chapter "Introduction : Historicising New Historicism" in New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (1992) is theoretically well informed. It is a brilliant entry point to understanding new historicism and its concerns. Besides these, A Glossary of Literary Terms (2015) by M.H. Abrams, Beginning Theory (2008) by Peter Barry, Dictionary of Critical Theory (2010) by Ian Buchanan and Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (2001) by Michael Taylor are other books useful for understanding the new historicist approach to literature.

It is pertinent to note that new historicism differs intrinsically from the old historicism. While the traditional/old historicism is monological: gives a single homogenized version of history, the new historicism sees history as plural, polyglot, and dialogic. The basic objective of the leftist new historicists is to bring about social justice by means of this analysis. In the leadership of Stephen Greenblatt, they strongly refuted the versions of old history in a series of compelling arguments. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) is an illustration of the fallacies of old history that claims to give an objective picture of past as orderly. In reaction against this claim, new historicists take upon the task of re-writing history with a recognition that past was always a site of conflicting centres of cultural powers and not a monological record of wars and revolutions of kings and monarchs or that of the dominant culture.

The key premise of new historicist reading is that literature should be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic. The social and cultural beliefs / practices of the author inevitable intrude his writing and the same unavoidably affect the critic's response to the text. The text has an inseparable bond with the context. The famous Marxist thinker Louis Althusser has pertinently described new historicism's interconnection of text and context as "a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history" (Qtd in Abrams, 2015: 245). In other words, history is conceived not as a set of fixed, objective facts, but like the literature with which it interacts, a text that itself needs to be interpreted. On the other hand, a text is conceived as a discourse which actually consists of what are popularly called representations or cultural constructs of the historical conditions specific to an era. Abrams has thus captured the spirit of new historicism: new historicists conceived of a literary text as "situated" within the totality of the institutions, social practices, and discourses that constitute the culture of a particular time and place, and with which the literary text interacts as both a product and a producer of cultural energies and codes. (2015:244) Instead of reading a text in isolation from its historical context, new historicists predominantly investigate the historical and cultural conditions of its production.

New historicism is fundamentally anti-establishment in its approach, always implicitly on the side of liberal ideals of personal freedom and accepting and celebrating all forms of difference and deviance. This notion of the theory is intrinsically inspired by the post-structuralist cultural historian Michel Foucault, according to whom, discourse is not just a way of speaking or writing, but the whole mental set and ideology which encloses the thinking of all members of given society. Peter Barry has thus summed up the essence of his thought:

It is not singular and monolithic- there is always a multiplicity of  discourses- so that the operation of power structures is as significant a factor in (say) the family as in layers of government. Hence, contesting them may involve, for example, the struggle to change sexual politics just as much as party politics. Thus, the personal sphere becomes a possible sphere of political action in ways which might well interest a feminist critic. (2008:176)

The new historicism found in the plays of Shakespeare a highly rich and comprehensive site where the contradictions of history and culture were easy to decipher and the earliest new historicist formulations in the pioneer works of Greenblatt, Belsey, Raymond Williams, Montrose proceeded from the Renaissance studies. They took upon themselves the task of re-reading literature by excavating the buried facts, by asking questions about those segments of culture–class, race, and gender--that were not addressed by conventional history or were mostly misinterpreted. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton have aptly described New Historicist reading of Shakespeare in the following passage:

Where [earlier] criticism had mystified Shakespeare as an incarnation of spoken English, it [new historicism] found the plays embedded in other written texts, such as penal, medical and colonial documents. Read within this archival continuum, what they represented was not harmony but the violence of the Puritan attack on carnival, the imposition of slavery, the rise of patriarchy, the hounding of deviance, and the crashing of prison gates during what Foucault called 'the Age of Confinement, at the dawn of carceral society'. (1992:08)

The new historicism employed the terms and jargons which derived a great deal from psychoanalysis and politics; for example, "the subconscious of the text", "the hidden agenda", "the rupture", "the differance", "aporia", etc. It must be acknowledged that Feminism has gained a good deal from the consolidation of all existing criticisms into new historicist or sociocultural criticism. From Kate Millett, Helene Cixous to Elaine Showalter, feminists have shown how the novels and stories should be studied, because they offer powerful examples of what the culture thinks about itself, articulating the underside of power– politics. They discern that literature is the agency through which the vested interests of the ruling patriarchy are propagated  and reinforced. All texts are, therefore, the ideological product of the relation of power in a particular society. This fact makes the authors ‘subjects’ and also the readers ‘subjects’. Just as author is the subject to the hegemony, the reader is  the subject to the text/ideology. It means that there is no 'objectivity’ that we experience in language/narrative. One may, however, find that in this context the author's and the reader's roles become highly ambivalent: both are subjects (to the text) and yet may have autonomous subjectivity and in this position their response to the text may be controversial – they may comply with the text's ideology or resist it.

New historicism has deconstructed and subverted the hidden game of power politics inherent in the texts. Greenblatt finds Henry plays  of Shakespeare unfolding the fact how the princely power relies on deceit, lies, betrayal, pretention, hypocrisy, and intrigues. The Tempest, in the new historicist reading, is a colonialist discourse that justifies the colonial rule on the natives in the relationship of Prospero and Caliban. Taming of the Shrew is a misogynist, sexual, political fantasy. Othello reveals the class and race conflict in displaced forms. Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, is a victim of the race conflict and a scapegoat of the Venetian antisemitism.

Feminists practising new historicism find, in the silence/exclusion of the female at the end of Macbeth or in the omission of Lear and Prospero’s wife,  the deliberate exclusion/silence of women from the patriarchal texts. Like Foucault, Virginia Wolf in her novel Between the Acts urges us to  "read between the lines" and uncovers the oppressive control of patriarchy on women and literature both. She is the one who raises the issue of 'Shakespeare's sister'.

E.M. Forster's novel about India (A Passage to India) and V.S. Naipaul's travelogue (An Area of Darkness) in new historicist readings present India as "metaphor of something other than itself... as profoundly unreal". Forster and Naipaul and their likes attempt to control the infinite mystery of the orient/India in terms of simplistic banalities vindicating the white colonialist project: the divine power of the white race over the natives. Conrad' Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, wants to justify a Eurocentric point of view, but ironically ends up decentering Eurocentrism. Within Conrad's text itself new historicist strategies are engrained and we find the narrative of the text subverting its own assumptions. In the new historicist sense, it is the masterpiece of anti-colonialist and anti-imperialistic thought.

With reference to new historicist approach to Indian culture and  literature, we find that this approach gives a richer and more complex version of meaning when applied to Indian texts. Even the ancient texts such as Manusmriti, Ramayana and Mahabharata could show how the patriarchal ideology inferiorized both women and the low castes. The ideologies of the epics and the scriptures colluded with the privileged high caste patriarchy and in the formation of culture both women and low caste communities were made to follow the patriarchal conventions and prescriptions that resisted their empowerment.

In the contemporary times, the whole range of twentieth century literature from Tagore's Four Chapters, The Home and the World, Sarat Chandra's Charitraheen to Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock could be seen and read as critique of patriarchy which trapped and straight jacketed the downtrodden class and women both. Tagore's Gora is an excellent example of his protest against castist and communalist sentiments. His A Wife's‘Letter voices the predicament and rebellion of a woman in the male and patriarchal society. One may find the whole fictional discourse as a counter ideological discourse in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. The novel interrogates the legitimacy of the voice of the privileged section in the society.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the new historicist criticism gave great impetus to the novels which in parodistic mode subverted most of the grand and exalted assumptions of history, politics, and religion. We have, for example, Salman Rushdie's The Midnight's Children, Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, and Khushwant Singh's Delhi. All these deconstruct the surface reality of Indian history and politics and give a new historicist version of corruption, greed, deceit, conspiracy, and lust for power, and sexual perversity involved in power game. Delhi, like Sri Lal Shukla's Rag Darbari, exposes the skeletons in the cupboard of our history and politics. In Midnight's Children Rushdie successfully matches the multitudinousness of India itself with a narrator's microcosmic personal history. The novel transforms the age-old Indian obsession with paradox-- with the riddle of singularity and plurality, of one- into-many into a dynamic metaphor for the continuing hope and pain that are  the legacy of a people who are, in Rushdie's words, "handcuffed to history".

1. Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New Delhi : Cengage Learning, 2015. 2. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New Delhi : Viva Books Private Limited, 2008. 3. Buchanan, Ian. Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2010. 4. Kott, Jan. Shakespeare our Contemporary. London : Methuen & Co. Ltd. 5. Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. London : Bloomsbury, 2012. 6. Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory. London : Bloomsbury, 2017. 7. Taylor, Michael. Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 8. Wilson, Richard and Dutton, Richard. "Introduction : Historicising New Historicism". In New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. Ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton. New York & London: Longman, 1992. PP 1-18.