How does New Historicism study literature as part of its historical culture?

New Historicism is a method of literary criticism that examines a text by situating it within the specific historical and social circumstances of its creation.12

Unlike formalist approaches that focus exclusively on the text itself, New Historicism emphasizes the "historicity" of a work. It studies literature as a product of its time by analyzing how the text interacts with the prevailing configurations of power, societal structures, and ideologies present when it was written. By connecting a work to these broader cultural forces, this method seeks to understand how literature both reflects and participates in the historical discourse of its era.21