Introduction: New Historicism as a Neo-Marxist Transformation
New Historicism did not emerge in a theoretical vacuum, nor was it a sudden poststructuralist rupture with Marxism. On the contrary, its conceptual DNA is deeply marked by neo-Marxist revisions of classical Marxist thought—particularly those associated with Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. What New Historicism ultimately abandons is not Marxism’s concern with history, power, and material conditions, but its epistemological confidence in ideology as a category anchored to truth.
This article advances a clear argument: New Historicism grows out of neo-Marxist theory and resolves its internal contradictions by replacing ideology with discourse. The movement from false consciousness to ideology, and finally to discourse, marks a theoretical progression rather than a break. Michel Foucault’s formulation of knowledge/power—often treated as anti-Marxist—is in fact intelligible only through Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Althusser’s theory of interpellation, both of which reconfigure how power operates through culture rather than merely through economic domination.
A central motivation for this shift lies in the failure of Marxist literary criticism to stabilize meaning. As the contradictory Marxist interpretations of modernism demonstrate—celebrating it as critique of alienation while condemning it as escapism—ideology proved insufficient as an explanatory tool. Stephen Greenblatt explicitly inherits this problem. His concept of the poetics of culture emerges as a response to the collapse of the linear base–superstructure model and the recognition that truth itself is historically and discursively produced.
New Historicism, then, should be read not as a rejection of Marxism, but as its theoretical afterlife.
Classical Marxism: From False Consciousness to Ideology
Classical Marxism begins with the notion of false consciousness: the idea that subordinate classes misrecognize their real material conditions due to dominant ideas imposed by ruling classes. In this early formulation, consciousness is distorted but corrigible. Truth exists in material relations, and revolutionary praxis promises to restore it.
As Marxist theory develops, false consciousness is refined into the more systematic concept of ideology. Ideology is not merely error; it is a structured system of representations through which social relations are lived and understood. Yet the assumption remains intact: ideology conceals reality. Beneath it lies truth—class relations, exploitation, and the logic of capital.
This epistemological assumption authorizes critique as demystification. Literary criticism, in this framework, seeks to expose how texts reproduce or contest ideological illusions. Even sophisticated Marxist critics operate within this truth/illusion binary.
However, this model depends on a stable distinction between reality and representation. As twentieth-century cultural forms grow increasingly complex, this distinction becomes harder to maintain. The crisis becomes visible most sharply in Marxist readings of modernism.
Marxism and Modernism: Contradiction as Theoretical Symptom
Marxist criticism’s engagement with modernism exposes a fundamental instability in the ideology model. Modernism generates sharply opposed Marxist interpretations, both grounded in the same theoretical premises.
One line of interpretation treats modernism positively. Fragmentation, alienation, and formal difficulty are read as historically truthful responses to capitalist modernity. Modernist aesthetics are seen as registering the reifying effects of commodity culture and the disintegration of traditional social bonds.
The opposing interpretation condemns modernism as politically regressive. Its inwardness, mythic structures, and aesthetic autonomy are interpreted as escapist withdrawals from collective struggle, aligning modernism with bourgeois individualism.
The persistence of this contradiction is not accidental. It reveals a deeper theoretical problem: if ideology provides access to historical truth, why does it generate incompatible truths?
Stephen Greenblatt explicitly recognizes this impasse. The inability of Marxist criticism to resolve such contradictions signals the exhaustion of ideology as a stable explanatory category. Rather than resolving contradiction, New Historicism makes it central.
Gramsci: Hegemony and the Culturalization of Power
Antonio Gramsci represents a decisive transformation within Marxism. His concept of hegemony shifts attention from economic determination to cultural consent. Power operates not only through coercion but through everyday practices, institutions, and forms of common sense.
Hegemony does not suppress alternative meanings; it absorbs, negotiates, and reorganizes them. Culture becomes the primary terrain of struggle. Literature, education, religion, and popular forms are all implicated in the production of consent.
Crucially, Gramsci weakens the ideology/truth binary. If domination operates through lived cultural practices, then ideology is no longer simply false belief but an active, productive force. Truth becomes less transparent, more embedded in social relations.
This reorientation prepares the ground for discourse theory. Power no longer resides exclusively in the economic base; it circulates through cultural forms.
Althusser: Interpellation and Ideology Without Outside
Louis Althusser radicalizes Marxist theory by rejecting humanist notions of subjectivity and transparency. His concept of interpellation describes how individuals become subjects through ideological structures.
Ideology, for Althusser, does not distort a pre-existing subject; it produces subjectivity itself. Schools, churches, media, and literature function as Ideological State Apparatuses that materialize ideology in practices.
Most importantly, Althusser claims that ideology has no outside. This formulation collapses the classical Marxist hope of stepping beyond ideology into truth. Critique itself is implicated in ideology.
Here, ideology begins to resemble discourse. Meaning, subjectivity, and power are co-constitutive. This insight directly informs later theories of discourse, particularly those associated with Foucault.
Fredric Jameson: Totality and the Political Unconscious
Fredric Jameson represents a late-Marxist attempt to preserve historical depth while acknowledging theoretical complexity. His famous claim—“Always historicize”—captures both continuity and change.
Jameson introduces the concept of the political unconscious. Literary texts do not transparently express ideology; instead, they symbolically resolve real social contradictions. Interpretation becomes a process of uncovering these buried conflicts.
Yet Jameson is acutely aware of fragmentation, postmodernism, and the loss of historical sense. His work oscillates between totalizing ambition and recognition of epistemological limits.
Jameson thus stands at the threshold. He still believes in historical truth and totality, but he recognizes that access to them is mediated, indirect, and unstable.
Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Emergence of Discourse
The final transformation from ideology to discourse is unthinkable without Nietzsche’s critique of truth. Nietzsche dismantles the idea of truth as correspondence, redefining it as a historically produced effect of power.
Although Michel Foucault is frequently positioned as a theorist who breaks decisively with Marxism, he explicitly acknowledges his intellectual debt to neo-Marxist thinkers, particularly Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. Foucault’s rejection of economic reductionism parallels Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which conceptualizes power as operating through culture, consent, and everyday practices rather than direct coercion. Similarly, Foucault’s insistence that there is no position outside power closely echoes Althusser’s claim that ideology has “no outside” and that subjects are constituted through interpellation. In interviews and methodological reflections, Foucault emphasizes that his concept of power is not centered in the state or the economy but is diffuse, productive, and relational—a position already prepared by Gramsci’s cultural Marxism and Althusser’s structural anti-humanism. Foucault’s notion of knowledge/power can therefore be read not as an anti-Marxist intervention but as a transformation of neo-Marxist insights into a post-Nietzschean theory of discourse, where truth is no longer concealed by ideology but produced within historically specific regimes of knowledge.
Foucault’s concept of knowledge/power formalizes these insights. Truth is not hidden beneath discourse; it is generated by it. Discourses determine what counts as knowledge, who can speak, and which statements are legitimate.
At this point, ideology becomes an insufficient category. Discourse does not mask truth—it produces it.
Stephen Greenblatt: From Marxist Impasse to the Poetics of Culture
Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism should be understood as a response to the internal contradictions of Marxist literary criticism. Rather than choosing between competing ideological readings, Greenblatt reframes the problem.
The poetics of culture abandons the linear base–superstructure model. Literary and non-literary texts circulate within the same discursive field. Power does not flow in a single direction; it is exchanged, negotiated, and transformed.
Greenblatt’s method foregrounds anecdote, contingency, and circulation. This is not a retreat from history but a rejection of totalizing historical narratives. Literature is neither ideological reflection nor autonomous aesthetic object; it is a cultural practice embedded in discursive networks. A brief example from Shakespeare illustrates Greenblatt’s New Historicist method more effectively than abstract explanation. In The Tempest, Prospero’s authority over Caliban has often been read either as an allegory of colonial domination or as a psychological drama of mastery and control. A Marxist ideological reading might ask whether the play critiques or reinforces imperial power. Greenblatt’s New Historicist approach reframes the question entirely.
Rather than deciding whether Shakespeare is “for” or “against” colonialism, Greenblatt situates The Tempest within a network of early modern discourses—travel narratives, colonial reports, legal treatises on sovereignty, and Renaissance humanism. Caliban’s famous complaint, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse,” is not interpreted as ideological truth or falsehood but as a discursive moment where language, power, and subjectivity intersect. The play does not reflect colonial ideology; it actively produces meanings about civility, savagery, authority, and resistance that circulated in early seventeenth-century England.
This is the poetics of culture at work: literature is neither a passive mirror of history nor an autonomous aesthetic object. It is a cultural practice through which power is negotiated, contested, and symbolically organized.
The contradictions that Marxism struggled to resolve—such as those surrounding modernism—become intelligible once truth itself is recognized as discursively produced.
From Ideology to Discourse: What Is at Stake?
The movement from Marxism to New Historicism is not a simple rejection. It is a transformation. Marxism’s concern with history, power, and material conditions survives, but its epistemological confidence does not.
Ideology assumes distortion of truth. Discourse assumes production of truth.
This shift explains why New Historicism can accommodate contradictory readings—such as those surrounding modernism—without anxiety. Contradiction is not a flaw; it is the condition of cultural meaning.
For students, this means learning to read texts as sites of negotiation rather than messages to decode. For teachers, it means resisting the temptation to moralize interpretation. For scholars, it means embracing complexity without abandoning historical responsibility.
Conclusion: New Historicism Beyond Base and Superstructure
New Historicism represents the culmination of a long theoretical evolution within Marxism rather than its negation. Beginning with false consciousness, moving through ideology, and arriving at discourse, critical theory progressively abandons the assumption of stable truth.
The influence of Gramsci’s hegemony and Althusser’s interpellation—mediated through Nietzsche and articulated by Foucault—makes it possible to conceptualize culture as a field where power produces knowledge rather than distorts it.
Greenblatt’s poetics of culture emerges precisely at the point where Marxist criticism confronts its own limits. The collapse of the base–superstructure model does not signal the end of historical analysis, but its reconfiguration.
New Historicism, therefore, should be read as neo-Marxism without epistemological guarantees: historically grounded, politically alert, and theoretically self-reflexive.
| Theoretical Stage | Key Thinker(s) | Core Concept | View of Truth | Role of Culture/Literature |
|---|
| False Consciousness | Karl Marx (early) | Misrecognition of material reality | Truth exists but is distorted | Literature reflects class illusion or awakening |
| Ideology | Marxist tradition | Systematic representation masking reality | Truth lies beneath ideology | Literature reproduces or contests ideology |
| Hegemony | Antonio Gramsci | Consent through culture and common sense | Truth becomes culturally mediated | Literature is a site of negotiation and consent |
| Interpellation | Louis Althusser | Subject formation by ideology | No position outside ideology | Literature participates in subject-production |
| Discourse | Foucault, Greenblatt | Knowledge/power formations | Truth is discursively produced | Literature circulates power within culture |