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You no longer privilege only literary texts - you begin to recognize and appreciate other texts, such as annals, rituals, fashion etc, since they are also part of the era. There is no more foregrounding of certain texts over others, and there is equal importance given to co-texts. New Historicism opposes the exclusively text-based approach. There is no more isolation. Texts cannot exist in a vacuum. New Historicism borrows heavily from Marxism, as with the the proposition that every text is rooted in social relations, factoring power struggles, and material conditions of life. Stephen Greenblatt  started this; he first used the term. Here's some ppt points: parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts reaction to text-only approach which placed literature in a vacuum; it was a recovery of the referent textuality of history and historicity of texts: texts and co-texts old historicism saw history as objective, unchanging and which can be recovered easily new hist...

Notes and excerpts from Susan Gubar's introduction to 'Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century': (i) Feminist studies have multiplied into various forms of inquiry in which every category linked to gender has itself undergone critical redefinition. (The book was published in 2000.) Just as proponents of identity politics enlarged the meaning of the term "women" by combining such categories as race and sex with gender analysis, post-structuralist thinkers used gender analysis to display the instability of such categories as race and sex. (ii) That is, the terms race, sex, religion, and caste started out as fixed phrases w.r.t. gender, but considerations of gender quickly complicated their meanings. (iii) Gubar held the "passionate belief that the pedagogic function of feminist studies depends on abrogating scholarly ghettoization and that its future vitality hinges on our ability to bring gender into play with different sorts of difference...