Question

Name the leading exponents of new historicism

Answer 1

Answer:

Explanation:

New Historicism is a form of literary theory whose goal is to understand intellectual history through literature, and literature through its cultural context, which follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of "Cultural Poetics". It was first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic and University of California, Berkeley English professor Stephen Greenblatt and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.[1] The term New Historicism was coined by Greenblatt when he "collected a bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done, I wrote that the essays represented something I called a 'new historicism'".[2]

Harold Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989),[3] noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicism; they are:

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.

— H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism