The New Historicism

'The New Historicism' is part of the 'old testament series.' It is written as a guide to biblical scholarships.

New Historicism is though of as a controversial yet influential movement in university literature departments and this has been the case for almost thirty years. This book evaluates the movement and investigates possible interpretations.

The book is written with a reader-friendly style that is suitable for non-specialists. The author takes an approach that defines New Historicism as a mindset rather than a method. It investigates the approach's development, discusses recurring features, and features relevant illustrations.

Here biblical texts are plunged back into the swirling currents of historical context only to disclose their plural, contradictory, fragmentary, and heterogeneous character. This includes the histories associated, represented, and embedded in those texts. In the process, the carefully guarded distinctions between text and context, history and literature, past and present, fade.

In exchange for the loss of these tidy categories, New Historicism promises sufficient compensation—namely, a potential venue where the sharply drawn border currently separating historical investigations from literary studies in biblical interpretation can be negotiated.