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Literature vocabulary · Criticism and Analysis

New Historicism

Meaning in literature, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In literature, New Historicism means: An approach reading literature alongside other texts and power relations of its historical period.

In Turkish: Yeni Tarihselcilik

How it is used

Use when literary works and contemporary documents illuminate each other's cultural assumptions.

Example sentences

  1. The essay uses New Historicism to read the play beside records of public punishment.

    The records help examine how the play represents authority.

  2. In our New Historicism seminar, a household manual changed our reading of the heroine's silence.

    An everyday document reveals expectations that shape the literary scene.

Common collocations

  • a New Historicism approach
  • New Historicism and power
  • literary theoryThe study of the ideas and methods used to read and interpret literature, such as structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism and postcolonial theory.
  • interpretationAn explanation of what a text or a part of it means, supported by evidence from the text; also the act of explaining it.

More terms: Criticism and Analysis

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