Among the literary and critical theories that gained currency over the course of the 20th century, two strands of thought in particular resonate: new historicism and aspects of neopsychoanalytic theory that touch on unconscious processes that operate not so much at the individual as at the social level, where experience is shared and unconscious processes are collectively enacted via encounters between and among inmates of the community, to shape human experience. Employing these disciplines to approach literary texts of any period would seem to enrich interpretation not only because it would enable criticism to capture something of the multivaried and not infrequently competitive inputs that characterize discourse of any culturally, politically, and socially complex age but also because--especially to the extent the two disciplines can be said to interpenetrate--they help supply an account of text that identifies meanings and implications relevant to both the context in which it was produced and the context in which its current reader operates. To explore the attraction of each of these methods of encountering text and to suggest possible ways in which they might be applied in practice is the subject of tshis research.
New historicism as a theory of textual critique appears to have been a term that its originator, Stephen Greenblatt, came to wish he had more thoughtfully considered and instead elaborated it as "a literary version of cultural anthropology" (Richter 1204). Even so, what both anthropology and history as disciplines share is a project of identifying and discerning meanings from what is visible in a culture, with a view toward locating the practices and events that lend it coherence. Cultural anthropology, for example as elaborated by such commentators as Foucault, also seeks to locate concepts that inform the construction of coherence (anyway perceived coherence) and the nature of the human (power) relationships that s...