Editing Historicism (section)

===New Historicism===
{{main|New Historicism}}

Since the 1950s, when [[Jacques Lacan]] and [[Michel Foucault]] argued that each epoch has its own knowledge system, within which individuals are inexorably entangled, many [[post-structuralist]]s have used ''historicism'' to describe the opinion that all questions must be settled within the cultural and social context in which they are raised. Answers cannot be found by appeal to an external truth, but only within the confines of the norms and forms that phrase the question. This version of historicism holds that there are only the raw texts, markings and artifacts that exist in the present, and the conventions used to decode them. This school of thought is sometimes given the name of ''New Historicism''. The same term, ''new historicism'' is also used for a school of literary scholarship which interprets a [[poem]], [[drama]], etc. as an expression of or reaction to the power-structures of its society. [[Stephen Greenblatt]] is an example of this school.