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Contemporary Cultural Theory

regarded as essentially cognate theoretical positions: so Felperin
describes cultural materialism as the ‘counterpart in Britain’ of
new historicism (Felperin, 1990, p. 1), while Wilson treats new
historicism as ‘the bastard offspring of... cultural materialism’
(Wilson, 1995, p. 55). Certainly, there are grounds for Wilson’s
claim.

Gallagher and Greenblatt
The founding text of a distinctively ‘new historicist’ critical
practice is generally held to be Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance
Self-Fashioning (Greenblatt, 1980), although the term itself wasn’t
used until his ‘Introduction’ to The Power of Forms in the English
Renaissance (Greenblatt, 1982, p. 5). Now Professor of English at
Harvard University and general editor of the Norton Shake-
speare, Greenblatt had studied at Cambridge and cheerfully
admits that his work in Renaissance studies was inspired in part
by Williams (Greenblatt, 1990, pp. 2–3). Though associated above
all with Greenblatt, other new historicist writers include Cath-
erine Gallagher, Walter Benn Michaels and Louis Montrose. The
title of Greenblatt’s 1982 volume is indicative of the general
character of the new historicist enterprise—both its debt to Michel
Foucault, whose work on knowledge and power we will
examine in chapter 4, and in its intention to explain the literary
text’s imbrication in the workings of Renaissance social structures.
As Greenblatt explains, Foucault’s extended visits to Berkeley
‘helped to shape’ their literary-critical practice (pp. 146–7).
New historicism’s starting point is something very like
Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’—that is, the close analysis of
the social, cultural and historical milieu in which a text is
produced and received (Geertz, 1973; Gallagher & Greenblatt,
2000, pp. 20–2). New historicist analyses typically bring both
literary and non-literary discourse into creative juxtaposition, so
as to show how social power and historical conflict permeate
the textuality of a society’s literature. So, for example, Greenblatt
sets the ‘eucharistic anxiety’ in Hamlet against the rhetoric of
Protestant opposition to the Catholic Mass (Gallagher and Green-
blatt, 2000, pp. 151–62). As Greenblatt himself describes it, he is

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