H. Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989), noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicist discourse; they were:
- that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
- that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
- that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably;
- that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature;
- that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.2
1 Ward, Glenn (2003) Teach Yourself Postmodernism, page 111 (Hodder Education) ISBN 978-0-340-85970-4
2 Veeser (1989) The New Historicism, "Introduction", page xi (Routledge) via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Historicism
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