Stephen Greenblatt New Historicism

The historian/critic is trapped in his own ‘historicity’. No one can rise above his own social formations, his ideological upbringing in order to understand the past on its terms.
What new historicists are concerned with is the recovery of the original ideology which gave birth to the text and which the text in turn helped to disseminate throughout a culture.
New historicism is a collection of practices rather than a school or a method. To further buttress this, Stephen Greenblatt who is considered as the one of the founders of this theory gave a list of the theory’s distinguishing characteristics:
• New historicists think of culture as a semiotic system, as a network of signs.
• They, therefore, are resistant to disciplinary hegemony, finding