Stephen Greenblatt (b 1943) is one of the most influential American literary historians, and a central figure in modern humanities scholarship. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. The cornerstone of his legacy is his role as the primary architect of New Historicism, a theoretical approach that fundamentally reshaped literary criticism in the 1980s and 1990s.

The New Historicist methodology demands the reading of “sub-literary” and non-canonical documents side-by-side with “great works”. Greenblatt and his colleagues often prefer the term “cultural poetics”. This preferred terminology emphasises the poetics – the generative, creative act – of cultural systems. Cultural poetics focuses on how expressive acts, including art

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