New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism are closely related approaches that emerged in the 1980s. Both insist that literature cannot be understood apart from its historical context — but both go further than traditional "background" approaches by arguing that literature is not merely a reflection of history but an active participant in the cultural processes of its time.

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New Historicism

Origins

New Historicism emerged in American Renaissance studies in the early 1980s, primarily through the work of Stephen Greenblatt. It was a reaction against two dominant approaches:

1. New Criticism — which treated literary texts as self-contained objects, isolated from history
2. Old Historicism — which treated history as a "background" to literature, assuming that literature passively reflected the "spirit of the age"

Key Principles

Principle	Explanation
Texts are products of their time	No text is timeless or universal. Every text is produced within specific historical, political, and cultural conditions
History is textual	We have no access to "raw" history — only to texts (documents, records, accounts). History is always already interpreted, narrated, constructed
Texts are historical	Literary texts are not merely reflections of history but active agents within it — they participate in the cultural processes of power, negotiation, and resistance
The circulation of social energy	Greenblatt's metaphor: cultural power does not flow in one direction (from "above" to "below") but circulates — texts absorb, transform, and redistribute social energy
Power and subversion	New Historicists are particularly interested in the relationship between power and resistance. Does literature subvert the dominant order, or does it ultimately reinforce it?

Greenblatt's Method: The Anecdote

Greenblatt characteristically begins his analyses with a striking anecdote — a historical document, a court case, a travel narrative — and then reads a literary text alongside it, showing how both participate in the same cultural processes.

Example: In Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Greenblatt reads Othello alongside contemporary accounts of European encounters with "exotic" others. He argues that Othello's self-fashioning — his construction of himself as both "Moor" and "Christian," both "exotic" and "civilised" — reflects the broader cultural process by which Renaissance Europeans constructed identity through encounters with racial and cultural difference.

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Cultural Materialism

Origins

Cultural Materialism is the British counterpart to American New Historicism. It derives from the work of Raymond Williams (who coined the term) and was developed by critics including Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Political Shakespeare, 1985).

How Does It Differ from New Historicism?

New Historicism	Cultural Materialism
American; primarily focused on the Renaissance	British; more politically explicit; wider historical range
Tends to see power as containing and absorbing resistance	Tends to see literature as a site of genuine political struggle
Influenced by Foucault's concept of power as diffuse and productive	Influenced by Williams, Gramsci, and British Marxism
Often pessimistic about the possibility of resistance	Often optimistic — committed to using literary criticism for political change
Asks: "How does power operate through culture?"	Asks: "How can culture be used to challenge power?"

Key Principles of Cultural Materialism

Principle	Explanation
Literature is material	Texts are not ethereal — they are produced, distributed, and consumed within material conditions (publishing, education, theatre, censorship)
The politics of the present	We always read from the present. Our interpretations are shaped by our own political moment. Cultural Materialism is explicit about this — it reads Shakespeare, for example, in relation to contemporary politics
Dissidence and containment	The central debate: does literature express genuine dissidence (challenging the dominant order), or does it merely appear to dissent while ultimately reinforcing the status quo?
The uses of culture	How are literary texts used politically — by governments, by institutions, by social movements? The "meaning" of a text is not fixed but changes as it is deployed in different contexts

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Applying These Approaches to Set Texts

Example: Shakespeare's Othello