New_Historicism_Critical_Book_Review

New Historicism Critical Book Review Cultural Poetics is term Stephen Greenblatt uses in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, meaning the interpretation of literature as an essential element in the cultural creation of identity. Greenblatt’s intention was to “explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyze the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity”. He states that all of the English writers he discusses have been drawn to the human subject and to self-fashioning. That the “Renaissance figures we have considered understand that in our culture to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let go of one’s stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction, is to die”. Chapter one describes, “the complex interplay in More’s life and writings of self-fashioning and self-cancellation, the crafting of a public role and the profound desire to escape from the identity so crafted”. In More’s work, the amount of power is based upon the outrageousness of the plot, the more shocking the fiction, the more exciting appearance of power. Greenblatt claims that in order to understand More, you greenblatt, understand, discusses, self-fashioning, identity, chapter, works, power, claims, book, time, spenser, renaissance, new, must, model, marlowe, english, during, between, because, wyatt’s, wyatt, wrote, written, writings, writers, work, while, upon, terza, states, six, selfhood, role