新历史主义指出，历史充满断层，历史由论述构成。以福柯的的概念，我们应透过各种论述去还原历史，而该种论述，是根据当时的时间、地点、观念建构的。换句话说，历史并不是对史实单一的记载，亦并不是对于过去的事件的单纯的纪录。德里达也说：「没有文本之外的世界」，语言本身就是一种结构，我们都透过这种结构再理解整个世界，新历史主义在1980年代萌芽，通过格林布兰特的作品发展，在1990年代得到更大的影响力。

New Historicism is a school of literary theory which first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic and Harvard English Professor Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. New Historicists aim simultaneously to understand the work through its cultural context and to understand intellectual history through literature, which follows the 1950s discipline of history of Ideas and refers to itself as a form of "Cultural Poetics."