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, ‘Cultural Studies and Renaissance in Africa: Recovering Praxis’, Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa [Pretoria, South Africa], 4, 2 (1999), pp. 43–8. 4 Michael Green, ‘“Cultural Studies!”, Said the Magistrate’, News from Nowhere: Journal of Cultural Materialism, 8 (1990), p. 36. 5 Tony Bennett, ‘Putting Policy into Cultural Studies’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 26. 6 For an interesting discussion of writing centres (based on US models) within South African universities
, ‘Varieties of Ideational Explanation’ in Andreas Gofas and Colin Hay (eds), The Role of Ideas in Political Analysis (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 50. Lawrence and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of Class Politics’, p. 147. 8 Here I draw upon Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism. Williams, Marxism and Literature , p. 94. 9 Gavin Miller, ‘Psychiatric Penguins: Writing on Psychiatry for Penguin Books, c. 1950–c. 1980’, History of the Human Sciences , Vol. 28, No. 4 (2015), pp. 76–101. 10 Contemporaries often drew attention to the
humanist thought’), 22 and ‘New Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’. The latter has close connections with ‘New Historicism’ in ‘its intellectual origins, and its explicit concern with power and its cultural representations’, but has, according to Hebron, ‘a more explicit and self-conscious political engagement, mixing French theoretical language with British polemical traditions of non-conformity and class-struggle’. 23 ‘New
stage. There are a number of sub-genres of tragedy – biblical tragedy and closet drama, for example – in which Shakespeare did not engage and there were also many sub-genres in which the nature of his influence was interrogated. The chapters in this collection also respond to the growth in interest in non-Shakespearean plays driven by the development of such critical and theoretical currents as new historicism, cultural materialism and feminism, as well as the recent re-emergence of repertory studies. A consequence of this has been that the range of Renaissance plays
practices adopted by proponents of New Historicism and cultural materialism Leeds Barroll used the example of Shakespeare’s Richard II and its relationship with Elizabeth and Essex to point out some of the potential blind spots in the arguments which emphasised the seditious nature of the theatre and its dramatists. He argued that the desire to link Shakespeare to Essex via Richard II came from ‘a narrative promoted by a nineteenth
representative of this approach, but other exemplars would be Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Patricia Stubbs, and Rachel Brownstein. However, most of these are in fact American rather than ‘Anglo’, and this should make us question the usefulness of this widely accepted category. English feminist criticism is, after all, often distinctly different from American: it tends to be ‘socialist feminist’ in orientation, aligned with cultural materialism or Marxism, so that it is obviously unsatisfactory to try to assimilate it into a ‘non-theoretical’ category. The existence of
the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is ‘consumed’, a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism (see Chapter 9 , pp. 184–9). A fifth Marxist practice is the ‘politicisation of literary form’, that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstance. For instance, in the view of some critics, literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures; for others, the formal and metrical intricacies of
–14. A number of other critics have argued that in 1611 it was Ireland rather than America which was at the centre of English colonial debate. See Paul Brown, ‘“This Thing of Darkness I Ackowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism , ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985
rapidly changing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean society and politics. 42 Her discursive complexity has provoked readings that have brought to bear upon her a range of disciplines and theoretical approaches. Psychoanalysis, history and anthropology, for example, all offer potential interpretations of the meaning of motherhood, just as theoretical perspectives from cultural materialism to feminism and deconstruction provide a range of
–14. 47 For a more sceptical view of the play’s legitimization of Malcolm, see Alan Sinfield, ‘ Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals’, in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 95–108. 48