Historicity of the Text and Textuality of the History: A Study of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Abstract

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines “new historicism a method of literary criticism that emphasizes the historicity of a text by relating it to the culture, society, or ideology in a given time” (n.pag.). New historicism is an approach to study literary text, which instead of dealing text in isolation study text with its cultural practices and writer’s social and biographical background. New Historicism got popularity first in America in 1980s through the work of Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1977), American critic who gave this term while studying the works of renaissance literature in his work Renaissance of Self-fashioning; From More to Shakespeare (1980). New historicism is the part of dynamic exchange between history and literature. It gives equal weight to literary and non-literary text. It opposed text-centered theories like new criticism, formalism, and like other approaches in literature, which primarily focused only on the meaning which is taken from words on the page. It argues that all the cultural and political aspects make psychological impact on writer which gives birth to the particular text. And once the text is produced, reader interprets the text and generates meaning by the parallel reading of text and co-text. The present study entitled Historicity of the text and Textuality the History: A Study of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner, study Khaled Hosseini’s first novel The Kite Runner (2003) through the lens of the theory of new historicism. So, the main objective of the study is to critically analyze Khaled Hosseini’s first novel The Kite Runner by focusing on all the important historical events which Khaled has textualized. And the study also analyze that how the historical events from pre-Soviet time to the fall of Taliban in 2001 effect the social, cultural and political system of the Afghan people.