International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

Not everyone, however, would agree with the implied radical political stance of the new
historicist movements. H.Aram Veeser, in his introduction to a 1994 collection of
readings, asks of New Historicism, ‘Is it liberal or Leftist? Literary or historical? Feminist
or neuter? Reformist or radical? Canon-making or canon-smashing? Stabilizing or
capsizing?’ (Veeser 1994:2) and points out that many believe that New Historicism is
‘bent on neutralizing solidarity, subversion, disruption, and struggle’ and that it
‘entertained from the first the heresy of a good capitalism’ (3). But he manages to give
the following five-point definition of the assumptions held by New Historicists:

1) that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;

2) that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and

risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;

3) that literary and non-literary ‘texts’ circulate inseparably;

4) that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths or

expresses unalterable human nature;

5) that a critical method and language adequate to describe culture under capitalism

participate in the economy they describe. Veeser 1994:2

Felperin argues that there are two broad schools of New Historicism, the American,
sometimes called ‘cultural poetics’, and the British, often referred to as ‘cultural
materialism’: ‘Whereas cultural poetics inhabits a discursive field in which Marxism has
never really been present, its British counterpart inhabits one from which Marxism has
never really been absent’ (Felperin 1991:88). The radical nature of cultural materialism
is made clear in books such as Dollimore and Sinfield’s collection of essays, Political
Shakespeare. In their foreword, the editors define cultural materialism as ‘a combination
of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis’
(Dollimore and Sinfield 1985: vii). The historical context,

undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text

and allows us to recover its histories; theoretical method detaches the text from

immanent criticism which seeks only to reproduce it in its own terms; socialist and

feminist commitment confronts the conservative categories in which most criticism

has hitherto been conducted; textual analysis locates the critique of traditional

approaches where it cannot be ignored. We call this ‘cultural materialism’.

Dollimore and Sinfield 1985: vii

Examples of how some of these new historicist ideas could be applied to children’s
literature are provided by the work of Mitzi Myers (Myers 1988; 1989; 1992). In a
statement which blends something of the American and the Britishbrands, Myers argues
that a new historicism of children’s literature would

integrate text and socio-historic context, demonstrating on the one hand how

extraliterary cultural formations shape literary discourse and on the other how

literary practices are actions that make things happen—by shaping the psychic and

moral consciousness of young readers but also by performing many more diverse

32 HISTORY, CULTURE AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE