Historical

Strategies
Tammy Tran
Peyten Ratzlaff
Ashley Rivera
Mr. Briggs
AP Lit; Period 2
Background
Window to the past
Provides info that is not readily perceived through other sources
Use history to understand literary works
Treat text as a document reflecting, producing, or being produced by
social conditions.
In order to understand a literary piece, one must also understand the
author's biography and social background, ideas circulating of the time,
and cultural milieu.
Literary History Criticism
Shift emphasis from period to the work.
May transcend time"addresses concerns of readers over decades, but it
remains a past that can reveal a works language, ideas, and purposes."
Looks into the facts of an author's life, the text itself, and the social and
intellectual currents in which the work was written. (Intertextuality)
Illuminate the historic background to reveal some aspects of the work.
Example - Hemingways Soldiers Home, knowing the ferocity of the
battles helps us account for Krebss response in the story
Marxist Criticism
- Focuses on the explicit and implicit assumptions and values about culture, race,
class, & power
- Typically aim at revealing and clarifying ideological issues and correcting social
injustices
- Used literature to describe how the competing socioeconomic interests advances
capitalist money and power rather than socialist morals
- Criticism is essential to politics
- Challenges or support economic oppression
- Even if they try to ignore class conflicts, it would support status quo
- Marxist reading perceive individual conflicts as a larger class struggle
- Death of a Saleman- Arthur Miller
- Focuses on the exploitive forces that cause Willy Loman to feel trapped
New Historicist Criticism
Emphasize interaction between the historic context of a work and a reader's
understanding and interpretation of a work.
Attempt to describe the culture of a period by reading a variety of texts that
traditional literary historians deemed were for economists, sociologists, and
anthropologists.
Read in all dimensions: political, economic, social, and aesthetic concern.
Explore how some forces shape different kinds of texts and how the text
influences other texts
Acknowledge the competing natures of readings of the past; offers new emphasis
and perspectives.
Sensitize us that history is created based off of one's own experience.
As time changes, so does ones understanding of the literary piece.
Cultural Criticism
Focus on the historical contexts of a literary work
Pay attention to popular manifestations of social, political, and economic contexts
Use strategies drawn from new historicism, psychology, gender studies, and
deconstructionism
Includes Postcolonial criticism - the study of cultural behavior and expression in
relationship to the formerly colonized world; the analysis of works written by
writers from countries that at one time were controlled by colonizing powers
Represents a broad range of approaches to examining race, gender, and class in
historical contexts
Serve to create a wider and more informed understanding of the story.
Examples
The Crucible (Literary History Criticism)
Approach with prior knowledge on the history of Salem at that time.
Reveal the theocratic government of the time.
Tells about society being easily influenced by others.
Dover Beach (Marxist Criticism)
Marxist critics would focus on how the perception of faith and
nature have changed through evolution.
Examines the idea that scientific theories can not make life
meaningful if there is no love
Focuses on the loss of faith and the possible substitution (love for
each other)
Continuation
Fences (Historical Criticism)
Take into account the time the author wrote it (1980's) and the
setting of the story (1950's).
Why the author wrote such a story; to reveal the African-American
experiences and race relations.
The Catcher in the Rye (Cultural Criticism)
Cultural Critics would focus on the social, political, and economic
aspects that shaped the time period Holden is living in.
Study the cultural behavior of the people living in the time and what
has caused these actions to occur
Examine the different behaviors between race, gender, and class