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: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London: Methuen, 1986). For the contrary argument see Alan Sinfield, ‘ Macbeth : History, Ideology, and Intellectuals’ in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 95–108; David Norbrook, ‘ Macbeth and the Politics of
Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton note, ‘the term “historicism” is capacious, and many varieties of historicist work are now flourishing’. 48 At the root of this ‘turn’, however, are American New Historicism and its British cognate Cultural Materialism, which sought to challenge both ‘the dominant historical scholarship of the past (in Renaissance Studies) and the formalist criticism that partially displaced this scholarship after World War Two’. 49 Whereas formalist critics had, it was said, insisted that literary works of art were
Subversion: Henry IV and Henry V’ , in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 33. 5 James I, The Kings Maiesties Speech to Parliament, 1609 (London: Robert Barker, 1609
Paul Brown, for example, characterises Prospero's constant reminders to ‘Ariel of his indebtedness to the master’ as ‘a mode of “symbolic violence”’: ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Discourse of Colonialism in The Tempest ’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 60. 94 Abraham, A Dictionary , p
suggested that the pressures of close analysis developed in the study of poetry would now be applied to the broader texts of cultural discourse. And in the United Kingdom, similar approaches emerged under the title of Cultural Materialism, drawing largely on the gripping work of Raymond Williams, primarily The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Interestingly, Greenblatt has spoken of being
. 8 Paul Brown, ‘ “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare, New Essays in Cultural Materialism , Manchester 1985, pp. 48–71, p. 58. 9 P
practical terms. In much recent criticism, economics has either been mapped familiarly as essential background to literary and cultural production, which risks leaving intact the text-context/infrastructure-superstructure divisions observed within traditional forms of socioeconomic historicism (as often occurs in cultural materialism, particularly in regard to studies of the early
overview of the connection between idolatry and slavery in Milton, see Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Milton and Idolatry’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 43 (2003), 213–42. 26 Dympna Callaghan, ‘Irish memories in The Tempest’, in her Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London, 2000), pp. 97–138, at p. 100. See also Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and Colonial Criticism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism
article with John Street, they call for a historical practice informed by Williams's cultural materialism that entails ‘the combination of empirical and archival research with a theoretical method that allows for the complexities, contradictions and contentious nature of punk's cultural practice to be embraced’. 70 While broadly sympathetic to this approach, I would add that an oral history methodology suggests some further complexities. How was the punk scene experienced as an everyday as well as an exceptional set of
). 40 Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson, On Pornography: literature, sexuality and obscenity law (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 96–102. 41 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 47.