Three Phases Of New Historicism

Since the emergence of New Historicism in the early 1980s, new historicist studies have undergone three phases of development through the last three decades. Actually, these studies might be starting a fourth one during this current decade. In the first phase, New Historicism succeeded to permeate its new assumptions and concepts, despite of the severe accusations of canon abashing. In “Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves,” Peter Erikson notes that New Historicism, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, has reached the stage where its initial phase of development has been completed, and has simultaneously entered “a transitional stage marked by uncertainty, growing pains, internal disagreement, and reassessment” (330). During the 1990s, Neema Parvini says in Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory (2012) that New Historicism emerged “reinvigorated and victorious … producing study after study in all periods across the discipline and establishing itself firmly as the new status quo”

It became the dominant practice followed by English Renaissance studies. Then, in the 2000s, New Historicism has become “so entrenched that critics felt they no longer needed to theorize to the extent they once did” (2). Recently, since the early 2010s, there is a tendency to reassess this legacy of the past thirtieth years suggesting new debates, especially, about its anti-humanist beliefs. New Historicism occupies a vast area of literary criticism. It also includes various key concepts and methods of analysis. This chapter is divided into two parts; the first one reviews most of the seminal works that elaborate New Historicism as a critical practice, while the second part reviews the major concepts and analytical methods of New Historicism on which this systematic