the winners" ( qtd.in Rewriting and reinterpreting of history through literature) . The new way of presenting history, filling up all previous omissions not in the least belittles the earlier versions. On the other hand it solidifies our knowledge of the past.
             There has always been a line of demarcation between literary texts and history. New Historicism which emerged in the late 1970s with the advent of Postmodernism challenges the traditional notions with regard to history. A natural tendency to treat history as a mere backdrop to literary texts is prevalent. New Historicism bridges this existing gap. To the New Historicists, history is also a text, open to all sorts of interpretations. Some of the key concepts associated with New Historicism are Louis Althusser's concept of ideology, Michel Foucault's theory of discourse and discursive formations, and Gramsci's concept of hegemony. New Historicism has imbibed most ideas from the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault. "Culture, text, discourse, ideology, the self, and history"( Critical approaches to Literature )form the basis for New Historicist principles.
             Gertrude Himmelfarb's essay Telling it as you like: postmodernist and the flight from fact is a good seminal piece which gives a brief overview of the ideas and ideals of New Historicism. The essay opens hinting at the crux of postmodernism. Postmodernism essentially is a defiance of conventions and conventionalities. It denies fixation. That the author is superior to the interpreter and that classic books possess greater literary significance than the comic books and popular fiction is not acceptable to the postmodernists. It has been taken for granted that History is a faithful mirror of the past. Postmodernism has swindled the objective status of History and reduced it to the status of a text. It breaks open all boundaries and promotes creative interpretative freedom.
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