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Abstract

New historicism is a branch of cultural studies, which focus on reinterpreting literary texts within the social, cultural and political context of the period in which texts are produced. July’s People (1981), is Nobel Prize winning novel by Nadine Gordimer. The novel deals with black liberation movement; who were segregated under the law of Apartheid in 1948, a conflict between black and white of South Africa. The narrator of the novel is Bamford Smale, who flees, with his wife and three children (all white people) to Johannesburg, the village of his servant July. They hide themselves in the hut of July. The novel posits history at the centre when black people of South Africa revolted against whites. It reveals a number of social, cultural, political milieu of that time. It is a discourse of many perspectives. The present paper is an attempt to see July’s People through the lances of new historicist to analyse the testimonial socio-cultural structure and mindset of black and white people at that time.  To do so the researcher will analyse the discourses of different perspectives in the novel along with a parallel study of other social documents.

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