New historicism was a 1980s thing, a literary critical movement that took shape on the West Coast, becoming established there and elsewhere as what one could talk about after having talked for long enough about feminism, deconstruction and literary theory. The term may have been coined by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay of 1982; if so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1958. Greenblatt himself came to prefer the term 'cultural poetics', but by the time he said so the nominal territory had already been claimed: 'new historicism' it was going to be, and has been ever since in the anthologies and commentaries published to represent and explain the recent evolution of Anglo-American literary criticism.

LRB 24 May 2001 | PDF Download