With lucid and non-technical language, this study sets forth New Historicism for the non-specialist. Defining New Historicism as a mindset rather than a method, it traces the development, discusses recurring features, and offers illustrations of this new literary approach. Here biblical texts are plunged back into the swirling currents of historical context only to disclose their plural, contradictory, fragmentary, and heterogeneous character. This includes the histories associated, represented, and embedded in those texts. In the process, the carefully guarded distinctions between text and context, history and literature, past and present, fade. In exchange for the loss of these tidy categories, New Historicism offers a potential venue where the sharply drawn border currently separating historical investigations from literary studies in biblical interpretation can be negotiated.
