New Historicism

CO-TEXT A historical document which is contemporary with and studied alongside a literary document. COMEDY A function or literary composition written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters depicted with a (usually) happy ending for the leading characters. CULTURAL MATERIALISM A critical practice that concentrates on the interventions whereby men and women make heir own history and desexualise the literary text in the political situation of our own (and not of its own day as New Historicists do). It reads the literary text in a way as to enable us to recover histories. It uses the technique of close textual analysis but often employ structuralist and post-structuralist techniques. It works mainly deep down traditional notions of the canon. EMPLOTMENT The process by which a text is organized into a plot. EMPLOTTED Organized into a plot. EPIC A long narrative poem celebrating the bully deeds of one or more legendary heros in a gra nd ceremonious style. EQUAL WEIGHTING A combined interest in the textuality of history, the historicity of texts (L.Montrose) FICTION-MAKING The historian bestows a particular significance upon certain historical events and then matches them up with a precise type of plot. MAINSTREAM LITERARY HISTORY Old historicism, possessive historical scholarship, monological, earlier historicism, single political vision, internally coherent and consistent, the status of historical fact, a stable point of reference. NARRATIVE A set of events (The story) recounted in a process of narration (or conversation). A telling of some true or fictitious event o connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator.NEW HISTORICISM A critical practice that gives equal weighting to literary and non-literary texts. It insists on the textualization of reality (from Derrida) and the premise that society is governed by the collusion between discourse and power (from Foucault). It places literary and non- literary texts in conjunction and interprets the former through the latter It looks for manifestations in text and co-text of State power, patriarchy and colonization. PLOT A particular pickax and reordering of the full sequence of events (story). The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work. ROMANCE A fictional story in indite or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting. A tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism. SATIRE A mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn. STORY The full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred in their likely order,, duration and frequency. In modern-day narratology, the sequence of imagined events that we reconstruct from the actual arrangement of a narrative. In the everyday sense, any narrative or tale recounting a series of events. adapt Adapting the facts to a particular sto ry form. TRAGEDY A serious play or novel representing the disastrous downfall of a central character, the protagonist. VALUE-NEUTRAL Historical events subscribe to narrative value only after the historian organizes them into a specific plot type. VERBAL FICTIONS A construct which is made of words and based on invention rather than reality.