Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Jay Greenblatt ( born November 7, 1943 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an American literary critic. He is a leading theorist of the New Historicism.

Life

Greenblatt studied at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge and Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1969. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now professor at Harvard University.

His main field of work is the work of William Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age. The he co-founded theory of New Historicism trying to see in the mirror of his time the literary work. Here Greenblatt used in his publications often contemporary sources, reads parallel to the literary text, and thereby attempting to reconstruct a piece of history. 1995 Greenblatt has proposed renaming of New Historicism in Poetics of Culture. This should proclaim his intentions, New Historicism to distance themselves from literary history, so as to emphasize its cultural anthropological claims.

Greenblatt is the founder and co-editor of the literary journal Representations, the central organ of the New Historicism. At times, Greenblatt was president of the MLA.

2011 Greenblatt was in the category of nonfiction for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern ( 2011 on the beginning of the Renaissance ) awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the National Book Award and in 2012.

Writings (selection )

• Three Modern satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley, 1965
• Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, 1973
• Renaissance Self- Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 1980
• Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, 1988; German: Negotiations with Shakespeare. Interior views of the English Renaissance, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-8031-3553-2
• Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, 1990; German: Dirty rites. Considerations between worldviews, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-8031-5133-3 )
• Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 1992; German: Wonderful possessions. The invention of the stranger. Travelers and explorers, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-8031-2296-1 )
• Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, 1992
• The Norton Shakespeare, 1997
• Together with Catherine Gallagher: Practicing New Historicism, 2000
• What is literature? , Frankfurt am Main 2000 (ISBN 3-518-12171-5 )
• Hamlet in Purgatory, 2001 Hamlet in Purgatory. German -language translation of Klaus Binder. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3518585078