New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.

New Historicism frequently addresses the critical theory based idea that the lowest common denominator for all human actions is power, so the New Historicist seeks to find examples of power and how it is dispersed within the text.

" Elsewhere, Paglia has suggested that New Historicism is " a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science.

The more recent influence of New Historicism and post-colonial studies have yielded readings of Shakespeare that typify the play as subversive, or challenging the status quo of Western imperialism.

The number of analytical approaches became more diverse by the latter part of the century, as critics applied theories such as structuralism, New Historicism, African American studies, queer studies, and literary semiotics to Shakespeare's works.

However more ambitious movements also developed from this insight into human culture, initially Romanticism and Historicism, and eventually both the Communism of Karl Marx, and the modern forms of nationalism inspired by the French Revolution, including, in one extreme, the German Nazi movement.

Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe ( Boston: Beacon Press 1967 ): " Under the Sign of Historicism " at 232-242, and " Jewish Rights between Red and Black " at 461-470.

This school of thought sometimes goes by the name of New Historicism.

Although some critics believe that these former philosophers have made more of an impact on New Historicism as a whole, there is a popularly held recognition that Foucault ’ s ideas have passed through the New Historicist formation in history as a succession of épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture ( Myers 1989 ).

Harnessing the work of the earlier New Historicism, this emergent field of historiography began to challenge the hegemony of Medieval historians over the history which they narrate, and opens the door for new modes of thinking by the proposition that " we cannot interpret medieval culture, or any historical culture, except through the prism of the dominat concepts of our own thought worlds.

Historicism says that Biblical prophecies provide us with a broad view of history, as well as an explanation of the religious significance of historical events.

* Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, attacks the notion that the study of history can be used to predict the future.

In this view, grand theories are unprovable, and instead intensive field work would determine the most likely explanation and history of a culture, and hence it is named Historicism.

Karl Popper used the term historicism in his influential books The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, to mean: " an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ' rhythms ' or the ' patterns ', the ' laws ' or the ' trends ' that underlie the evolution of history ".

Harold Bloom criticizes the New Historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history, and for not paying attention to the details involved in analyzing literature.

Post-structuralism uses the term New Historicism, which has some connections to both anthropology and Hegelianism.

In Popperian terms, the " New Historicism " is an example of historism rather than of historicism proper.

Like Gloria Steinem, Faludi has criticized the obscurantism prevalent in academic feminist theorizing, saying, " There's this sort of narrowing specialization and use of coded, elitist language of deconstruction or New Historicism or whatever they're calling it these days, which is to my mind impenetrable and not particularly useful.

" The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 24. 1, Cultural Studies and New Historicism ( 1991 ): 39-49.

Cultural Materialism and New Historicism.

* Stephen Greenblatt: New Historicism

Category: New Historicism

* New Historicism

* Stephen Greenblatt ( 1960 ) – Shakespeare scholar, academic, literary critic, pioneer of New Historicism.

Similarly, Michel Foucault's New Historicism posits that there is a quasi-linguistic structure present in any age, a metaphor around which all things that can be understood are organized.

Today, " thick description " is used in a variety of fields, including the type of literary criticism known as New Historicism.

New Historicism is claimed to be a more neutral approach to historical events, and to be sensitive towards different cultures.

H. Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism ( 1989 ), noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicist discourse ; they were:

Influential historians behind the eruption of the New Historicism are Fernand Braudel and the Annales School.

In its historicism and in its political interpretations, New Historicism is indebted to Marxism.

In its tendency to see society as consisting of texts relating to other texts, with no ' fixed ' literary value above and beyond the way specific societies read them in specific situations, New Historicism also owes something to postmodernism.

New Historicism shares many of the same theories as with what is often called cultural materialism, but cultural materialist critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups.

With this in mind, New Historicism is not “ new ”.

But New Historicism differs from both of these trends in its emphasis on ideology: the political disposition, unknown to an author himself, that governs his work.

For those within Haredi Judaism, who favour ascribing causes, some blame the Holocaust on the abandonment of many European Jews of traditional Judaism, and their embrace of other ideologies such as Socialism, Zionism, or various non-Orthodox Jewish movements.

Before World War II, Deutscher opposed Zionism as economically retrograde and harmful to the cause of international socialism, but in the aftermath of the Holocaust he regretted his pre-war views, and argued a case for establishing Israel as a " historic necessity " to provide a home for the surviving Jews of Europe.

Though Zionist groups were first competing with other Jewish political movements, Zionism became an equivalent to political Judaism during and after the Holocaust.

Outside the Satmar Hasidic community, Teitelbaum is probably best known for his opposition to all forms of modern political Zionism, and for his controversial statements in which he blamed the Zionists for the death of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

After events of the 20th century, most importantly the Holocaust and the establishment of the modern State of Israel, opposition to Zionism largely disappeared within Reform Judaism.

Maybaum wrote many reflections on Judaism, Christianity, the Holocaust and Zionism.

SA claims that they have " supported innumerable protests against anti-Semitic bigots such as the Holocaust denier David Irving " and believes that Israel's most strident critics are often Jewish themselves, citing Jewish Marxists Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg in their opposition to Zionism, who saw it as a pro-imperialist ideology.

He identifies some of its main features as the identification of Zionism and racism ; the use of material related to Holocaust denial e. g. doubts about the number of victims and allegations that there is a " Holocaust industry "; a borrowed discourse from third worldism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-Americanism, and anti-globalization ; and the dissemination of what he calls the " myth " of the " intrinsically good Palestinian — the innocent victim par excellence.

The immigration of millions of European Jews to North America caused a dramatic increase in the number of Jewish English-speakers ; colonialism in the Maghreb led most of its Jews to shift to French or Spanish ; Zionism revived Hebrew as a spoken language, giving it a substantially increased vocabulary and a simplified sound system ; the Holocaust eradicated the vast majority of Yiddish-and German-speaking European Jews ; and the Arab-Israeli conflict led many Jews to leave the Arab world for other countries ( mainly Hebrew-speaking Israel and French-speaking France ), whose languages they largely adopted.

Displays include an enormous collection of books written, published, illustrated, or translated by Romanian Jews ; a serious archive of the history of Romanian Jewry ; a collection of paintings of and by Romanian Jews that, while relatively small, consists of works of a calibre worthy of a major art museum ( many of the same artists ' works hang in the National Museum of Art ); memorabilia from Jewish theaters including the State Jewish Theater ; a medium-sized display devoted to Zionism ; a small but pointed display of anti-Semitic posters and tracts ; two rooms off to a side, one dealing with the Holocaust era from a historical point of view, the other a Holocaust memorial ; discussion of both favorable and unfavorable treatment of the Jews by various of Romania's historic rulers ; in short, a museum devoted to looking seriously at the history of a particular ethnic group within a society.

Laqueur has written on many topics from the German Youth Movement, Zionism, Israeli history, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic and Russia, Communism, the Holocaust, fascism and diplomatic history of the Cold War.

Rense's radio program and website, Rense. com, cover subjects such as 9 / 11 conspiracy theories, UFO reporting, paranormal phenomena, Holocaust denial, Zionism, tracking of new diseases and possible resultant pandemics, environmental concerns ( see chemtrails ), animal rights, possible evidence of advanced ancient technology, geopolitical developments and emergent energy technologies, complementary and alternative medicine among other subjects.

* Shabtai Tzvi, Labor Zionism and the Holocaust.

" His criticisms of Zionism, Jewish identity, and Judaism, as well as his controversial views on The Holocaust and Jewish history have led to allegations of antisemitism and racism from both Zionists and anti-Zionists.