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How did New Historicism study literary works as products of particular social and historical settings?

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Antique book open to the frontispiece of The Iliad of Homer, showing the title and an engraved portrait of a bearded man, with old books in the background. — literature *The Iliad*, an epic of the Trojan War attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, is considered a foundational work of Western literature.

New Historicism is a method of literary criticism that emphasizes the historicity of a text by examining it as a historical artifact. Rather than viewing a work in isolation, this approach situates literature within the specific social, intellectual, economic, and political circumstances of its time.123

By relating a text to the configurations of power, society, and ideology prevalent during its creation, New Historicism seeks to understand how these external forces shape the work. A key aspect of this methodology is its focus on the perspectives of groups or individuals who were marginalized, unrepresented, or discriminated against based on factors such as gender, ethnicity, or social class.13

In contrast to approaches like New Criticism—which often prioritizes the text as a self-contained, unified unit of meaning—New Historicism explicitly rejects the neglect of historical context, treating the literary work as an active participant in the complex power dynamics of its era.32