New Historicism and Arundhati Roy’s Works

New Historicism provides a critical method of interpretation of a literary work of art, which came into being as a reaction against New Criticism just as New Criticism came into being as a reaction against historical and biographical methods of literary criticism. The new critics consider a literary text as an autonomous entity. They are suspicious of history and consider the discipline as enemy of literature. The new historicists like its British counterpart cultural materialists, reject the new critical precept. They see literature and history as a part of dynamic exchange. New Historicism is based on the assumption that a literary work is the product of the time, place, and circumstances of its composition. The new historicists, therefore, reject the autonomy of both an artist and work of art and argue that literary texts cannot be read and understood in isolation. They emphasize that literary texts must be read and interpreted in its biographical, social and historical contexts.