HISTORICAL APPROACH

 Historical Criticism: This approach “seeks to understand a literary work by

investigating the social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it—a context that
necessarily includes the artist’s biography and milieu.” A key goal for historical critics is
to understand the effect of a literary work upon its original readers.
 One of the most basic approach used in the analysis of literary work refers to the
historical method of literary criticism. In line with this, (Russell 1966) assures that the
critic interprets the poem within the history, or contemporary frame of reference, behind
the poem.
 Historical approach is one of the method to analysis literary work in which the author
and the reader comprehend the message of the literary work by remembering the
moment/historic moment a long with the literary work written.
 The historical approach was somewhat abandoned in the mid-twentieth century, in the
wake of “New Criticism,” a school which disregards the author to focus on the work
itself. However, in the last thirty years or so, it has made a come-back with slightly a
different approach and under the name: “New Historicism.”
 New Historical critics, according to Lois Tyson, consider literary texts to be “cultural
artifacts that can tell us something about the interplay of discourses, the web of social
meanings, operating in the time and place in which the text was written”.
 They argue that “the literary text and the historical situation from which it emerged are
equally important because text (the literary work) and context (the historical conditions
that produced it) are mutually constitutive: they create each other” (Tyson 291-292).
 New Historical critics study how literary interpretations are shaped by the culture of the
various interpreters.
 An historical approach to literary interpretation and analysis is perhaps the oldest and
one of the most widely-used critical approach.
 The historical approach involves understanding the events and experiences surrounding
the composition of the work, especially the life of the author, and using the findings to
interpret that work of literature.
 The historical approach, then, usually helps the critic and readers to understand all of
the events and forces that might affect the author as he or she is composing the work,
and this gives us a more comprehensive understanding to the work itself.