Abstract: The “newness” of New Historicism lies in textualizing and analyzing history and interpreting from cultural perspectives, by attaching emphasis no longer on the history constructed by real events, but on the text composed of discourse symbols and the culture embodied throughout the text. Therefore, a more accurate expression of New Historicism should be “historical culturalism”. Compared to traditional Historicism influenced by Positivism, New Historicism transforms an extrinsic historical perspective of literature into an intertextual relationship between historical and literary texts in the cultural field. On the one hand, it is a path-breaking method regarding history as a textual construction, but not an objective existence by textualizing history, wavering the deep-rooted linguistic transparency in historical narratives, transforming the extrinsic history into an intrinsic one by the method of text-culture. On the other hand, New Historicism extends formal methods to the cultural field by establishing an intertextual relationship between literary and historical texts, transforming the original intertextuality between literary texts into “cross-genre intertextuality” between literature and history. In a sense, New Historicism has also broken the pure intrinsic nature of research methods such as formalism and structuralism, opened the way for cultural research as a pan-textual approach, and formed cultural and historical poetics. However, this method still faces two dilemmas: first, it causes the negative structure of binary opposition in literary theory to be more prominent; second, it results in the emptying of the meaningful core of “history” and turning it into a hollow concept. This dilemma of New Historicism is also the ultimate dilemma of the attempt of literary theories when criticizing positivism and empiricism as well as reconstructing a theoretical system of text-autonomy by using the synchronic structure of binary opposition. New Historicism has brought literary theory “outside of literature”, but it has not enabled literary studies to go “outside of culture” or “outside of text”. New Historians are still unable to step outside of “Prison-House of Language” put forward by Jameson, and the textualization of everything, in fact, denies that literary can have any real value beyond the text.

Key words: New Historicism, literary theory, Historical Culturism