New Historicism is the most innovative and popular critical movement that came into existence in the 1980s. The credit for the emergence of this new critical manifesto goes to Stephen Greenblatt who initiated a reactionary canon in the sphere of literary theory to the prevailing text-oriented critical approaches pursued by New Critics, deconstructionists, structuralists, and poststructuralists. New Historicists, like these rigid followers of linguistic approaches, undoubtedly acknowledge the importance of literary text, however, they also analyze it with an insight into its historicity, as a literary text does not exist in a cultural vacuum. The phrase coined by Louis Montrose, `historicity of the text and textuality of history,' is the critical premise of New Historicists. The present paper aims at analyzing the new historical insights in Lionel Trilling's famous critical treatise The Liberal Imagination. An attempt has been made here to analyze how Lionel Trilling stresses the direct and reciprocal relationship between literature and culture and how he defends the true liberal flexibility and openness of mind for dealing with literary works. This analysis reveals the fundamental similarities and dissimilarities between Lionel Trilling's critical canon and that of New Historicists, with a hypothetical feasibility of Lionel Trilling's contribution to New Historicism. This is the focal issue scrutinized here, as New Historicists too, like Lionel Trilling, think that for a literary critic, `an honest place [is] in between.'

Lionel Trilling's career as a literary critic was marked by a reflective consistency, as he could not prevent himself from taking the initiative to respond observantly to political and social changes. The best of his critical essays, though they are concerned with particular time and place, reveal the problems of literature and social life. Trilling was aware of the fact that literature requires double commitments, contiguously, to itself and to the external realities. Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, first published in April 1950, comprises his best argumentative literary essays of previous decade, and is now considered a thread of intellectual plentitude as well as his obituary left to modern critics till now. It came as a classical treatise to exemplify the quintessential reminders and corrective to literary criticism. How literature is to be studied, what should be its content, and how much would we lose if it became an end in itself rather than reflecting the social reality are some of the critical queries raised and solved by Trilling. He tries to advocate a balanced study of literature, giving it its proper place with an admirable sensibility and centrality of purpose, as literature deals with matters of our common experience. A critic should view a literary work as something having its own significance and relevance. The tangential complexity of Trilling's critical manifesto is due to the fact that it was determined by his liberal outlook and sensitive approach. He was keenly conscious of the relationship between literature and social forces.

An interesting question is why Trilling's critical canon holds its significance even now, though various new theories have gained prominence. In response to this inquiry, we should start with a reconsideration of his most celebrated work, The Liberal Imagination, in relation to the New Historical critical canon, since it contains something more than criticism, more than literature itself, which addresses directly a historical sense attended with liberal imagination on the part of a literary critic. In the "Preface" to The Liberal Imagination, he demonstrates that "the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism" suggest "especially the relation of these ideas to literature." He explains that these essays are in the strain of liberalism"a word primarily of political import, but its political meaning defines itself by the equality of life it envisages, by the sentiments it defines to affirm" ("Preface," p. xii).

American Literature Journal, Historical Tenets, Modern Critics, Liberal Imagination, Social Forces, Socialist Realism, Stalinist Criticism, Critical Liberalism, Cultural Interpretation, Poststructuralism, Lionel Trilling, Linguistic Articulation, Political Events, Cultural Repression, Cultural Forms, Linguistic Complexities.