Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :“The New Historicism: Back to the Future” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History
The new historicism….has emerged as a kind of systems analysis….By our functionalist exercises in closed-field intertextuality, we tacitly reject that teleological formalism associated with the old historicism, the dominant form of nineteenth-century historiography. Ours is an empirically responsible investigation of the contemporary meanings informing literary works (their parts, their production, their reception), as well as other social texts. We regard these meanings as systematically interrelated within the period in question.
In case you didn’t get it yet, we New Historicists aren’t just analyzing literature. We’re analyzing literature and the system (social, cultural, economic, historical) that it’s a part of.
We’re doing things in a much bigger way than the literary critics who came before us, because we’re just that awesome. Those old dudes just liked to sit there and analyze a poem without considering its historical or economic context—or any other context for that matter.
Whereas we analyze the poem and everything that’s around it: its author’s biography, the social environment it came out of, its historical context, the color font it was originally penned in. Why? Because we believe that everything is connected. If we want to understand a love poem from the Renaissance, we need to figure out how people thought about love and marriage back in the day and how they went about doing it (marriage, that is), and then we can understand the significance of the poem.
Levinson’s statement is useful because she’s making it clear how the New Historicists differ from the literary critics (especially the New Critics) who came before them. The New Historicists, in contrast to the old-school literary critics, are all about context, of course.