New historicism allows the reader to incorporate important historical information into the reading of the text, not only through factual information like names and dates, but also contextualizing that information to make it relevant to the text. I think one of the most important key terms of new historicism is “interpretation,” because new historicists understand that, “our understanding of what such facts mean, of how they fit within the complex web of competing ideologies and such social, political, and cultural agendas of the time and place in which they occurred is…strictly a matter of interpretation, not fact” (268-269). Recognizing that our understanding of a previous time period and the goings on during that period can only be interpreted means understanding that there is a limit to what we can know, and that what we think we know can be skewed over time as we misremember or misinterpret events from the past. Interpretation then opens the door for subjectivity, giving the new historicist the ability to decide what information is most relevant to the text, and how to apply it.

While new historicism is most obviously helpful when dealing with texts that are much older and requite a bit of background information to be understood. That being said, really any text has have new historicism applied to it. For example, it is extremely relevant to apply new historicism to Dracula, because it is an old text, so new historicism would help contextualize why women are portrayed the way they are, how religion factors into the book based on how important it was at the time the book was written, etc. New historicism could also be applied to R E D because understanding our current historical and political climate allows us to understand why a book like R E D is so important and how queer erasure and gender are being reclaimed and reapplied.

For most of recent history, the contributions of queer people have been erased, or their identities have been so that their contributions can be celebrated. Recently it was discovered that the skeletons of two people holding hands, known as the “Lovers of Modena,” were both men. There were then a frenzy of other labels being used including, “best friends,” “soldiers,” “brothers,” etc., erasing the fact that the skeletons were queer.

Knowing that the above is the kind of society in which we live today, where people are constantly trying to erase the identity of queer people, it increases the need for a book like R E D, which takes the story of Dracula and makes backout poetry out of it, literally erasing the original story to create a queer narrative of transitioning, survival, power dynamics, etc.