Foucault’s Concept of History and New Historicism: Points of Convergence
This paper attempts to explore the impact of Michael Foucault’s theoretical understanding of history on New Historicism, a literary school that developed in North America in the later part of the twentieth century. While Foucault is known throughout academia for his extraordinarily wide range of interests, this paper aims only to focus on his radical perspective on history and to show how that perspective is linked in vital way to the development of new historicist strategies, highly innovative in themselves, that seriously challenge, if not redefine, the traditional humanist interpretation of literature. Attempt therefore has been made in this paper to examine how Foucault’s ‘epistemic break’ and ‘archeological’ model of history as a ‘discontinuity’ remain as important points of reference for the new historicist interpretation of textuality, authorship, theatre and culture at large. While discussing new historicism, this paper largely draws upon the opinions of Greenblatt and Montrose, two pioneering theorists of this school.
