History and Literature

Part I: Self-fashioning
Part II: Literary text V.S. Non-literary text
 Self-fashioning （自我形塑）

Self-fashioning: The process of constructing

one’s identity and public persona according to a
set of socially acceptable standards, and the
conscious effort to strive to imitate a praised
model in society.

Stephen Greenblatt. Photo by Teresa Wood.

 Self-fashioning

“Self-fashioning for such figures involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated at
least partially outside the self—God, a sacred book, an institution such as church, court, colonial or
military administration.”

“Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This

threatening Other—heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist—must be discovered or
invented in order to be attacked and destroyed.”

--- Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt.

 Self-fashioning

Self-image/Subjectivity:
shaped in the process of negotiation with the outside world

Literature: cultural artifacts

interplay of discourses, the web of social meanings,
product of the contemporary social, political and cultural conditions
 Literary text V.S. Non-literary text

History V.S. Literature-- BackgroundV.S. Foreground?

Old historicism: Literature mirrors historical reality.
New historicism: Literature and history affects each other.

Literary text V.S. Non-literary text—

Sublime expressions of the human spirit V.S. boring description of stable history?
Old historicism: different order of textuality
New historicism: parallel reading; equal weight

.
History and Text

Louis A. Montrose, one of the

representatives of new historicism, gives
his definition of new historicism as
“The historicity of texts and the
textuality of the histories”.
 “By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the historical specificity, the social and material
embedding, of all modes of writing---including not only the texts that critics study but also the texts
in which we study them; thus, I also mean to suggest the historical, social, and material embedding
of all modes of reading.”

--- “New Historicism”, Louis Montrose.

“The historicity of texts”:

① All the texts are socially historic, because they are the products of some
specific history, economy, politics, culture, and etc.
② Any interpretation of the texts is not purely objective as it is inevitably social
and historic.
③ The text is not merely the “reflection” of history. It is a historical and cultural
event that has the power to help shape the society, so it is an important part of
history.
“By the textuality of histories, I mean to suggest, in the first place, that we can have no access to a
full and authentic past, to a material existence that is unmediated by the textual traces of the society
in question; and furthermore, that the survival of those traces rather than others cannot be assumed
to be merely contingent but must rather be presumed to be at least partially consequent on subtle
processes of selective preservation and effacement---processes like those that have produced the
traditional humanities curriculum. In the second place, those victorious traces of material and
ideological struggle are themselves subject to subsequent mediations when they are construed as
the “documents” on which those who profess the humanities ground their own descriptive and
interpretive texts.”

--- “New Historicism”, Louis Montrose.

“The textuality of histories”:

① We have to depend on the texts to know the history, otherwise we have no

other way. And the text is not an objective and passive reflection of history, it
goes through the process of selection, effacement and preservation.

② The text can serve as a medium for interpretation. When historians write
history, they consult the texts that become the basis of history, the texts thus
once again serve as the media of interpretation.
Works Cited
1. Greenblatt, Gunn. Redrawing the Boundaries. New York: The Modern Language Association of

America, 1992. 
2. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1980.
3. https://literariness.org/2016/10/18/the-concept-of-self-fashioning-by-stephen-greenblatt/
4. 张进 . 新历史主义文艺思潮通论 . 广州 : 暨南大学出版社 , 2013.