Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to the work of the left-wing

literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural materialism makes analysis based in critical theory, in the
tradition of the Frankfurt School.

It emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s along with new historicism, an American approach
to early modern literature, with which it shares much common ground. The term was coined by Williams,
who used it to describe a theoretical blending of leftist culturalism and Marxist analysis. Cultural
materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a
particular moment in history.

Williams viewed culture as a "productive process", part of the means of production, and cultural materialism
often identifies what he called "residual", "emergent" and "oppositional" cultural elements. Following in the
tradition of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci and others, cultural materialists extend the class-based
analysis of traditional Marxism (Neo-Marxism) by means of an additional focus on the marginalized.

Cultural materialists analyze the processes by which hegemonic forces in society appropriate canonical and
historically important texts, such as Shakespeare and Austen, and utilize them in an attempt to validate or
inscribe certain values on the cultural imaginary. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, authors of Political
Shakespeare, have had considerable influence in the development of this movement and their book is
considered to be a seminal text. They have identified four defining characteristics of cultural materialism as
a theoretical device:

 Historical context
 Close textual analysis
 Political commitment
 Theoretical method

Cultural materialists seek to draw attention to the processes being employed by contemporary power
structures, such as the church, the state or the academy, to disseminate ideology. To do this they explore a
text’s historical context and its political implications, and then through close textual analysis note the
dominant hegemonic position. They identify possibilities for the rejection and/or subversion of that position.
British critic Graham Holderness defines cultural materialism as a "politicized form of historiography".

Through its insistence on the importance of an engagement with issues of gender, sexuality, race and class,
cultural materialism has had a significant impact on the field of literary studies, especially in Britain.
Cultural materialists have found the area of Renaissance studies particularly receptive to this type of
analysis. Traditional humanist readings often eschewed consideration of the oppressed and marginalized in
textual readings, whereas cultural materialists routinely consider such groups in their engagement with
literary texts, thus opening new avenues of approach to issues of representation in the field of literary
criticism.

References
 Barry, P. 2003. Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
 Brannigan, J. 1998. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Basingstoke, Hampshire and
London: Macmillan.
 Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield. 1985. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism.
2nd Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
 Milner, A and Browitt, J. 2002. Contemporary Cultural Theory. 3rd Edition. London and New York:
Routledge.
 Milner, A. 2002. Re-Imagining Cultural Studies: The Promise of Cultural Materialism. London,
Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage.
 Milligan, Don, Raymond Williams: Hope and Defeat in the Struggle for Socialism, 2007.
  Parvini, N. 2012. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural
Materialism. New York and London: Bloomsbury.
 Price, B. 1982. "Cultural Materialism". American Antiquity 47.4: 639-653.
 Rivkin, J and Ryan, M. 1998. Literary Theory: an Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
 Ryan, K. 1996. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: a Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

New Historicism is a form of literary theory whose goal is to understand intellectual history through
literature, and literature through its cultural context, which follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and
refers to itself as a form of "Cultural Poetics." It was first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the
work of the critic and Harvard English Professor Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the
1990s.[1]

H. Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989),[2] noted some key
assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicism; they are:

1. that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;

2. that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks
falling prey to the practice it exposes;
3. that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably;
4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses
inalterable human nature;
5. […] that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism
participate in the economy they describe.

— H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism

New Historicism is often criticized for lacking a grasp of historiography as practiced by professional
historians. As a postmodern form of historiography, New Historicism denies the grand narrative of
modernity, often taking relativist stances which deny scientific, transhistorical concepts or social forms.[citation
needed]

Carl Rapp argues that "[the New Historicists] often appear to be saying, 'We are the only ones who are
willing to admit that all knowledge is contaminated, including even our own'".[4]

Camille Paglia likewise cites "the New Historicism coming out of Berkeley" as an "issue where the PC
academy thinks it's going to reform the old bad path, I have been there before they have been, and I'm there
to punish and expose and to say what they are doing...a piece of crap."[5] Elsewhere, Paglia has suggested
that New Historicism is "a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or
political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense."[6]

Harold Bloom criticizes the New Historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history, and for not
paying attention to the details involved in analyzing literature.[citation needed]

Sarah Maza argues that “Gallagher and Greenblatt seem oblivious of the longer range of disciplinary
development in history; they reject grand narratives as extensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
nationalist, socialist or whiggish programs, obfuscating the fact that such mid-twentieth century innovations
as histoire totale and quantified social history, large in scale as they were, originated from a desire to make
history more democratic and more inclusive.”[7]