Biographical, Historical, and New Historical Criticisms

What is biographical criticism?  Can you differentiate between historical criticism and New Historicism?  Read this post to learn more about the three criticisms.

Biographical Criticism 

A biographical critic analyzes a literary work with reference to the author's life, drawing clues for the interpretation and appreciation of what he/she wrote.  That is different from the procedure during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when critics such as Samuel Johnson wrote biographies of each poet before proceeding to criticize their works.  It is important to remember that a work may contain biographical elements, but those elements will lose their specificity in the work as a whole.  The view that art is simply a form of self-expression--the transcription of personal feelings and experiences--is demonstrably false.  Even when there is a close relationship between a work and the author's life, one must never construe the work as a mere copy of his/her life.  That does not mean biographical criticism is not illuminative; it can make a work more meaningful.  But we must be aware of its shortcomings.  According to Steven Lynn:
     For some writers, biographical information is sparse or suspect:
     for J. D. Salinger (fiercely reclusive) or Homer (perhaps not even
     a single person), we'd like to know a whole lot more.  For other
     writers, there is a wealth of information, sometimes contradictory
     and confusing: to understand Samuel Johnson for instance, you'd
     need to study Boswell's magnificent and massive Life of Johnson
     (five volumes in the standard edition), as well as at least a dozen
     other biographies and memoirs, not to mention the life and works
     of those around Johnson (not to mention Boswell's drafts and
     notebooks, which have some surprising differences with what he
     published), and so on.

     Second, once we think we have biographical information, there's
     the problem of how to use it to illuminate creative work.  We
     know Hemingway was wounded in World War I, and "A Very
     Short Story" features a soldier who was wounded, so can we
     conclude that the soldier is Hemingway?  No, we can't.  What if
     the soldier in the story is recovering in the same town in which
     Hemingway recovered, and is involved with a nurse who sounds
     a bit like a nurse Hemingway was involved with?  We would still
     diminish the literary work, rather than enhance it, if we assume
     that Hemingway's story is simply covert autobiography.  By
     insisting on a distinction between the author and his creations,
     we're in a better position to appreciate the literary work and the
     artistic choices the author made in crafting it.¹ 

Historical Criticism 

Does historical criticism have any shortcomings?  Language is not a stable and objective phenomenon, so it is often necessary to study the language of an age to properly understand an early literary work.  For example, if homely means "domestic" in England and "ugly" in the United States, then English readers who read the word in an American literary work will misunderstand the character completely.  Some may argue, however, that linguistic knowledge is not historical knowledge, for language is not merely the dictionary meaning of words.  Words gain meaning through associations, systems of thought, and rhetorical traditions. 

Historical critics attempt to make readers aware of the nature of a work written in a different tradition from that to which the readers are accustomed.  Critics often use it when they want to analyze and interpret a seventeenth-century work, for example.  However, historical criticism has deficiencies.  If the critic's purpose is to assess a work as an example of literature, then one may argue that any historical consideration is irrelevant (New Criticism).  A work of art is either good or bad, and though historical information may account for its goodness or badness, such information cannot alter the evaluation.  That does not mean historical criticism is useless.  According to Steven Lynn, "A larger historical perspective sees the work of an author within the context of his time and place.  Hemingway and his work can be illuminated by a better understanding of World War I, of its battles, its hospitals and medical practices, and of the values and ideas at work in Hemingway's culture."² 

New Historicism 

Rather than analyzing a text in isolation from its historical context, new historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural conditions of its production, its meanings, its effects, its interpretations, and its evaluations.  It is not a return to an earlier kind of literary scholarship, for the views and practices of new historicists differ from those of former scholars who had referred to social and intellectual history as a background against which to set a work of literature as an independent entity or had viewed literature as a reflection of the worldview characteristic of a period.  Instead, new historicists conceive of a literary text as situated within the institutions, social practices, and discourses that constituted the culture of a particular time and place and with which the literary text interacted as both a product and producer of cultural energies and codes.

What is most distinctive in this mode of historical study is mainly the result of concepts and practices of literary analysis and interpretation that have been assimilated from various recent poststructural theorists: Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin.  Although there is considerable diversity and disagreements among individual exponents of new historicism, the following proposals occur frequently in their writings.

1. Literature does not occupy a trans-historical aesthetic realm that is independent of the economic, political and social conditions specific to an era, nor is literature subject to timeless criteria of artistic value.  Instead, a literary text is simply one of many kinds of texts, all of which are formed and structured by the particular conditions of a time and place and among which the literary text has neither unique status nor special privilege.  A related fallacy of mainstream criticism, according to new historicists, is to view a literary text as an autonomous body of fixed meanings that cohere to form an organic whole in which conflicts are artistically resolved (New Criticism).
2. History is not a homogeneous, stable pattern of facts and events which literature reflects or which a critic uses as the background to the literature of an era.  Rather, a literary text is embedded in a specific historical context.
3. The humanistic concept of an essential human nature common to the author, the characters, and the audience is an ideological illusion.  Furthermore, the view that a literary work is the imaginative creation of a free or autonomous author who possesses a unitary, unique and enduring personal identity is also fallacious.
4. Similar to the authors who produce literary texts, readers are subject to the conditions and ideological formations of their times.  All claims, therefore, for the possibility of a disinterested and objective interpretation and evaluation of a literary text are among the illusions of humanistic idealism.

Treating each text equally, a new historicist reads multiple literary and nonliterary texts from a particular period in an attempt to understand that period more fully.  New historicists question the traditional objective view of history; they reject the supposition that historical texts contain facts.  Such facts are actually the subjective creations of the authors, the historians themselves.  In other words, history is an amalgamation of people's personal experiences and views.  For that reason a literary text is only one of many equally important accounts of a particular period.
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     ¹Steven Lynn, Literature: Reading and Writing with Critical Strategies (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004) 205-206.
     ²Ibidem, 206.