New Historicism And New Criticism: Inheritance And Negotiation

New Historicism has been viewed as Formalists' gravedigger and New Criticism's terminator for a long time in the western literary arena. After deeper research of the New Historicism, the formalist tendency in it could be trailed. Furthermore, New Historicism can be seen as the legacy of New Criticism. The present thesis is trying to re-examine New Historicism in the aftermath of New Criticism on the basis of comparative study of the two theories. New Historicism has improved the traditional Historicism in the field of Mechanical Determinism and admitted the Subjective Initiative which is embodied in the paradigm and self-formation. New Critics emphasizes text-centered criticism, and develops "close reading" as a tool of analyzing the self-sufficient text. Comparatively, New historicism based on the text-centered New Criticism decodes history and culture and borrows "close reading" to elaborate the historic events as another type of "text". On this sense, New Historicism transcended New Criticism in revealing the hidden ideology concealed in the historic text.The present thesis comprises five parts. The introduction presents literary review and depicts the structure of the whole thesis. The first chapter introduces the concept of the two theories and their background. Through Stephen Greenblatt's academic experience, the present writer introduces the New Criticism's great influence on the New Historicism. Chapter two introduces the concepts of formalism, selfhood-issue and subjectivity. Through these the present writer analyzes the common between the Formalism (including the New Criticism) and the New Historicism. The present writer analyzes the inheritance and innovation between the New Historicism and the New Criticism through the view of the historic and the text. The last part is conclusion of the paper. The present writer gives the summary of the complicated relationship between the New Historicism and the New Criticism in it.There are two features of the paper:the first is the present wrier uses many methods to compare the New Historicism and the New Criticism, such as the influence research of the Compared Literature, the discourse analyze and the ideology criticism, the aesthetic criticism and the society history criticism. The paper involves many theory (including the Formalism, the New Historicism, the New Criticism, the Historicism, the Culture Research and subjectivity) and many areas (such as culture, drama, architecture and poetry).The second is there are not enough research paper of the New Historicism translated into Chinese and the present writer uses many firsthand data in English to analyze the problem and has a special view.