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Clarifying New Historicism through a Critical Look at the Papers Applying the Approach in Iran As an approach to the relationship between literature and history, new historicism has been highly received in Iranian academia. This reception was concomitant with some misunderstandings. A part of these misunderstandings is the result of the elusive nature of the approach. Moreover, lack of theoretical works in Iran has led to serious problems. Even though this approach is not a very recent one, it is a novelty in Iran. One of the reasons behind this novelty is lack of sufficient theoretical source in the field. A glance on the practice of new historicism reveals the interest in the field along with the lack of sufficient theoretical source has led to some misunderstanding. The present paper tries to correct some of the misunderstandings surrounding this approach. Keywords: New Historicism, History, Literature, Pathology, Power, Discourse, Greenblatt, Foucault.

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New historicism refers to an approach that does not accept history as the historians convey. This approach mostly is based on the ideas of the American professor, Stephen Greenblatt, in the eighties of the twentieth century. According to Greenblatt, new historicism presents a new reading of the text, not a school of criticism. New historicism investigates the multilateral relations of the literary works with other texts including the historical ones to clarify their inter-textual and extra-textual aspects. New historicism inspects the relations of power and cultural, social, and ideological constructs. From the new historicist point of view, there is no difference between literary and non-literary texts. The present paper attempts to examine The Silence of the Sea to reveal the author’s and the history’s influence in creating the literary work. With the help of Greenblatt and Foucault views, inter-textual factors such as power relations as the main context are studied in the paper as well.
 
 

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The present study is a comparative study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason and Iris Murdoch’s The Bell. The main focus is on “unreliable narrator” which is a popular concept at the present time when humanity enjoys manipulating each other and suffers himself from misunderstandings. Wayne C. Booth was the earliest theorist who provided a practical definition of “unreliable narrator” and his theory is considered as the framework. Previously, the studies only focused on homodiegetic narrators but, here, other narrative techniques are analyzed. In other words, the point of view and the presence of multiple perspectives and voices are crucial in the analysis of unreliable narratives. These narrative techniques and unreliable narrators are scrutinized at the social and political contexts of the novels. Accordingly, New Historicism, specifically Stephen Greenblatt’s theory, is used as another approach to reveal the presence and function of the unreliable narrators in the selected literary works.
 

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Commonly, facing the works of art within a historical theme, we either expect the work to match exactly with history, or expect to see some kind of artist's point of view from that historical period. The former cannot be recreated or represented in the world of art. The latter, however, does not have the same application. Therefore, with sufficient knowledge of the author and the discourse conditions and power relations during his life period, his perspective on history in a historical work can be analyzed better. In this article, through a comparative and historical method, two plays Death of Yazdgerd written by Bahram Beyzai and Romulus the Great written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt were examined from the perspective of new historicism to show how two playwrights were affected by history in two different places and times, and consequently influenced the history of their time. This comparative research shows that choosing a specific period of history to write a play was purposeful. Also, writing about a historical period is affected by the period of the playwright's life and culture, and the reason for the difference in the power relations and the ending of the texts lies within the same context.