Stephen Greenblatt's The Tragedy Of State: The Textuality Of Literature

The term ‘new historicism’ was first used by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt whose book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1980) is regarded as its beginning. However, similar tendencies can be seen in works by various critics published during the 1970’s, a good example being J.W. Lever’s The Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama. A simple definition of the new historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, generally of the same period. That is to say, new historicism refuses to ‘privilege’ the literary text, instead of a literary ‘foreground’ and a historical ‘background’ it envisages and practices a mode of study in which literary and non-literary works are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other. This ‘equal weighting’ is proposed in the definition of new historicism offered by the American critics Louis Montrose who defines it as a combined interest in ‘the textuality of history, the historicity of texts’. It involves ‘an intensified willingness to read all the textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts’.
Many Indian English writers have turned to the past as much to trace the deepening attitude of nationalism so as to cherish the memories of the bygone days. Ghosh’s concept of history colours all his writing. The Glass Palace presents history as a collective memory, which folds in a symbiotic fashion all