Stephen Greenblatt:The Critic As Anecdotalist (Critical Essay‪)‬

In "The Forms of Power and Power of Forms in the Renaissance," a widely cited introduction to a special issue of the academic literary journal Genre, Stephen Greenblatt provides a fanfare for the arrival of "what we may call the new historicism, set apart from both the dominant historical scholarship of the past and the formalist criticism that partially displaced this scholarship in the decades after World War Two." This older scholarship, Greenblatt maintains, "tends to be monological; that is, it is concerned with discovering a single political vision, usually identical to that said to be held by the entire literate class or indeed the entire population." "Literature," he continues, "is conceived to mirror a period's beliefs, but to mirror them, as it were, from a safe distance." By contrast, "The new historicism erodes the firm ground of both criticism and literature. It tends to ask questions about its own methodological assumptions and those of others." (1) The introduction that is credited with introducing the term "new historicism" concludes with this peroration: