Stephen Greenblatt is best known as one of the founders of New Historicism, a critical approach he first named in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance. He is also widely known for Will in the World, a Shakespeare biography that spent nine weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won both the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2012.
What did Stephen Greenblatt win the Pulitzer Prize for?
Stephen Greenblatt won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2012 for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. The same book had already won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 and the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association that same year.
What is New Historicism in literary criticism?
New Historicism is a set of critical practices that reads literary texts in relation to the historical, institutional, and social contexts that produced them. Greenblatt introduced the term in 1982 and often calls the approach "cultural poetics." It differs from New Criticism by insisting that texts cannot be understood in isolation and that any critic's reading is shaped by their own historical position and beliefs.
Where does Stephen Greenblatt teach?
Stephen Greenblatt has been the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Before Harvard, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for 28 years, becoming a full professor there in 1980.
What is Stephen Greenblatt's connection to the Norton Shakespeare?
Stephen Greenblatt is the general editor of the Norton Shakespeare, with the most recent edition published in 2015. The role has been described as his most influential piece of public pedagogy, shaping how Shakespeare is taught to students across multiple countries.
What was Stephen Greenblatt's family background?
Stephen Greenblatt is an Ashkenazi Jew of Lithuanian descent. His paternal grandparents came from Kaunas and his maternal grandparents from Vilnius. They immigrated to the United States during the early 1890s to escape a Czarist Russification plan targeting young Jewish men for conscription into the Russian army.