New Historicism Analysis on The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
Introduction New historicism is an approach based on the reading of literary text and non-literary text in parallel and usually of the same historical period (Barry 172). It is a method that studies a text’s contemporaneous historical context by interpreting a situation or scenes in a literary text which interrelates with a non-literary text that are connected to one another. New historicism puts literary text and non-literary text on equal weighting, emphasizing on the parallel reading of literature and history in which new historicists look at the history as represented in the literary texts. This theory does not put non-literary text as the background of a literary text but instead they are co-text. The “equal weighting” of the existence of literary and non-literary texts has led the American critic Louis Montrose to define this theory as a combined interest in ‘the textuality of history, the historicity of texts’ (Barry 116). Literary text and non-literary text...