The Ambiguity of Fantasy: A Cultural Reading of P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins by Mark Young
Professor of Renaissance literature and preeminent literary critic Stephen Greenblatt sees works of art, such as literature, as “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses.â€[1] His technique, popularly known as New Historicism, strives to recreate the socio-historical realities of a time period in order to better understand the “circulating social energies†of a time—the ways a text both draws influence from and impacts its cultural milieu.