ABSTRACT
When we talk about New Historicism, we often define it by its relation to other schools of criticism. Sometimes it is compared with older forms of historical criticism; more frequently, it is contrasted with poststructuralism, in reaction to which it arose in the early 1980s. But only rarely is New Historicism considered in relation to literary history. Literary historical criticism, the study of literary texts in relation to previous or subsequent literary texts, although not nearly as prevalent as it used to be, has never wholly gone out of fashion. It might seem to be complementary to historicist inquiry—indeed, even a subset of it. If New Historicism means the study of texts in relation to any and all contiguous “texts,” in the broadest sense of that term, then old-fashioned influence studies would seem to be encompassed by historicist methodology.
