A typical focus of new historicist critics, led by Stephen Orgel, has been on understanding Shakespeare less as an autonomous great author in the modern sense than as a means of reconstructing the cultural milieu of Renaissance theatre—a collaborative and largely anonymous free-for-all—and the complex social politics of the time.
Unlike fine arts, which had been discussed in purely formal terms, comparable to the literary New Criticism, under the influences of Bernard Berenson and Ernst Gombrich, nuanced discussion of the arts of design since the 1970s have been set within social and intellectual contexts, taking account of fluctuations in luxury trades, the availability of design prototypes to local craftsmen, the cultural horizons of the patron, and economic considerations—"the limits of the possible" in economic historian Fernand Braudel's famous phrase.
It is also a response to an earlier historicism, practiced by early 20th century critics such as John Livingston Lowes, which sought to de-mythologize the creative process by reexamining the lives and times of canonical writers.
There is a popularly held recognition that Foucault's ideas have passed through the new historicist formation in history as a succession of épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture (Myers 1989).
Although the movement is publicly disapproving of the periodization of academic history, the uses to which new historicists put the Foucauldian notion of the épistémè amount to very little more than the same practice under a new and improved label (Myers 1989).
[5] Camille Paglia likewise cites "the New Historicism coming out of Berkeley" as an "issue where the PC academy thinks it's going to reform the old bad path, I have been there before they have been, and I'm there to punish and expose and to say what they are doing...a piece of crap.