Marxist literary criticism reads a text's class relationships, economic structures and material conditions as central to what the text means, not as neutral scenery the plot merely happens to unfold against. A related but distinct approach, new historicism, treats a text as inseparable from the specific historical and social conditions of when it was written, reading a work alongside other documents from its own period rather than as a timeless artifact addressing universal human concerns in isolation from its own moment.
Marxist criticism asks what a text's economic relationships actually reveal
Marxist criticism draws directly on the wider Marxist tradition's emphasis on class and material economic conditions as fundamental drivers of social life, applying that same emphasis specifically to literary interpretation. A Marxist reading of a given text asks how the story's economic structures actually function — whose labour produces the wealth visible in the story, who benefits from that labour, and whose economic position the text's own narrative choices tend to make visible or, just as tellingly, render invisible or unremarkable. This approach treats a story's economic setting as doing real interpretive work, not as mere incidental background the plot happens to be set against.
New historicism reads a text against the other documents of its own moment
New historicism, developed later and somewhat distinctly from classical Marxist criticism, though sharing its interest in power and social structure, approaches a text by reading it directly alongside other documents from the same specific historical period — legal records, private letters, other contemporaneous texts — rather than treating the literary work as a self-contained artifact addressing timeless human themes independently of its own particular historical moment. This approach treats a text's meaning as genuinely inseparable from the specific circumstances of when and where it was actually written, resisting readings that abstract a work too far from its own historical context.
What we're still unsure about
That Marxist and new historicist criticism represent genuinely distinct, well-established approaches within literary studies, each with a substantial critical tradition behind it, is well documented in the history of literary theory. What remains more genuinely debated among critics is how much interpretive weight either approach should place on authorial intention versus a text's broader economic or historical context that the author themselves may never have consciously addressed — critics continue to disagree about where the line falls between a genuinely illuminating economic or historical reading and one that imposes a framework onto a text more than it actually draws one out of it, a live methodological question rather than a settled one.
This sits inside Marxist & New Historicist Approaches, one of seven topics in Literary Analysis, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.