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to incorporate a concern with culture and humanism into his own reworking of Marxism as ‘cultural materialism’. He thus added to the New Left interpretation of labourism a more nuanced and sympathetic element, taking it beyond an orthodox Marxist approach. But though his analysis went further than those of other New Leftists in acknowledging the value of indigenous radical ideas, and the genuine human sources of some Labour Left thinking, Williams nevertheless shared with other New Left writers the view that the dominant traditions and internal structural logic of
about the presence of the aesthetic necessary in the first place. Formulation of the idea of the early modern can be taken as an exemplary moment in the permeation of a ‘new’ historicism through literary studies since the early 1980s, most obviously through the twin historicisms of cultural materialism and cultural poetics. 1 The periodising title early modern
single line cut. He would direct every line Shakespeare wrote – even ones the Oxford editor Stanley Wells thought Shakespeare himself might have ‘tightened up in rehearsal’ (Wells 1989 , 176). Next, he would ignore the ‘alarums and excursions’ that had been convulsing academic Shakespeare scholarship over the previous fifteen years via the discourses of French theory, American New Historicism and British Cultural Materialism (including anything any of the theorists had to say about Antony and Cleopatra ) and instead situate his production inside a ‘traditional
something other than a decision-making moral agent. Well before the current vogue for cultural materialism took root in Shakespeare studies, criticism dating back to the nineteenth century focused on Merchant ’s theological implications, and reduced Shylock’s character to an allegory for another kind of materialism: economic acquisitiveness and greed, which were thought to
settles on the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), which was adopted by the Swiss Reformed churches, as one of the bases for his ‘discussion of the religious ideas that shaped the way Sidney saw his world’. 5 Alan Sinfield, in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading , asserts that Sidney ‘belonged to the puritan party’. 6 He uses ‘puritan’ ‘to mean those committed to the zealous maintenance and furtherance of the Elizabethan protestant settlement’, which, in Sinfield’s view, did not ‘involve a distinctive doctrinal perspective’, as
, Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71, and David J. Baker, ‘Where is Ireland in The Tempest? ’ in Burnett and Wray eds, Shakespeare and Ireland , pp. 68–88. 29 Cited in Michael Quinn ed., Henry V: A
Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 47.
to linear patterns on the one hand, or to the domesticated post-structuralist practice of ‘allowing a free interplay among texts, including the texts of historical reality (sometimes distinguished as “contexts”)’ 72 on the other. Hillman invokes Jean Howard’s odd conflation of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism as critical tendencies that seek ‘virtually to strip literary works of textuality by positing “a hierarchical relationship in which literature figures as a parasitical reflector of historical fact”’. 73 This
language and philosophy, rather than history or context. In the 1980s a shift occurred which is sometimes called the ‘turn to history’, whereby history, politics, and context were reinstated at the centre of the literary-critical agenda. Thus, in the early 1980s two new forms of political/historical criticism emerged, new historicism from the United States and cultural materialism from Britain. Both these take what might be called a ‘holistic’ approach to literature, aiming to integrate literary and historical study while at the same time maintaining some of the
in Chapter 9 , in which we saw how ‘British’ cultural materialism and ‘American’ new historicism are clearly linked in their approaches and aims, but differ in emphasis and ‘ancestry’. Generally, the preferred American term was ‘ecocriticism’, whereas ‘green studies’ was frequently used in the UK, and there was perhaps a tendency for the American writing to be ‘celebratory’ in tone whereas the British variant tended to be more ‘minatory’, that is, it sought to warn us of environmental threats emanating from governmental, industrial, commercial, and neo