Context Oriented New Historicism & Cultural Studies + Reception Theory & History (Reader-oriented)

By Katie-Ann
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    New Historicism

  • Marxist Literary Theory

    Karl Marx's writings (as there were many there is more than one date, so I just entered this date because it's roughly half way through his life), along with the works of other theoreticians, such as Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci, make up Marxist Literary Theory. Marxist Literary Theory analyses texts as expressions of economic, sociological and political factors. New Historicism gained much of it's terminology and philosophical foundations from Marx's (+ others) theory.

  • Wolfgang Iser- the 'blank' theory

    Reader-oriented Reception theory Notion that texts have 'blanks' which the reader fills in according to their personal life experiences.

  • Edgar Allan Poe: Good example of 'blanks' in texts

    His murder mystery books, especially 'The Murders In The Rogue Morgue" (1841).

  • Stephen Greenblatt develops foundations to this theory

    Greenblatt found that by examining a colonial American texts alongside Shakespeare's play, the 'Tempest', comparisons could be made between the representations of the relationship between the Indians and Europeans (in colonial text) and the structures of dependence (Tempest) that exposed power as being a deeply rooted cultural thing that defined society at that time. This approach/discovery went on to form the foundations of New Historicism.
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    Cultural Studies

  • Homi Bhabha- Indian Theorist

    Bhabha incorporated ideas of Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction in his theory that culture is a phenomenon that shows analogies of recent gender studies. Cultural Studies is closely linked to him because of this. (please ignore 19 feb because the text only gave the year)

  • Raymond Williams

    He developed the theory that cultural understanding can only be gained through studying every aspect of a culture rather than studying a single aspect.
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    Reception theory

  • Micheal Foucault

    • Note that the yr here is the death date of Foucault. I can't find the date of his theory. Foucault based his approach to texts on his theory of the limits of collective cultural knowledge and on his technique of examining an array of documents in order to understand society at a certain time.