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This lesson teaches two closely related, historically grounded critical approaches that emerged in the 1980s: New Historicism (American, associated above all with Stephen Greenblatt) and Cultural Materialism (British, associated with Raymond Williams, Jonathan Dollimore, and Alan Sinfield). Both insist that literature cannot be understood apart from the culture that produced it — but both go decisively beyond the older "background" model by arguing that a literary text is not a passive mirror of its age but an active participant in the cultural processes of power, negotiation, and resistance. By the end you should be able to read a text as something that does work within its historical moment, not merely something coloured by it.
As a lens, this pairing serves AO5 by giving you a body of "different interpretations" — and, crucially, a live debate within that body, since New Historicism and Cultural Materialism disagree about whether literature can genuinely resist power. Because both approaches are explicitly historical, they are the lenses most naturally fused with AO3 (the significance of contexts) — but they refuse to let context be inert "background," which is precisely the discrimination examiners reward. As always, the approach earns marks only when fastened to AO2 analysis of the writer's methods and AO1 textual evidence, and it makes for incisive AO4 connections wherever two texts negotiate power, authority, or dissent. The recurring discipline of the lesson is captured in one verb: a text participates; it does not merely reflect.
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:
Against both, New Historicism argues that text and context are made of the same stuff. We do not have a literary "foreground" set against a historical "background"; we have a single cultural field in which sermons, pamphlets, trial records, travel narratives, and plays all circulate together, shaping and being shaped by one another. The label itself is often traced to Greenblatt's introduction to a 1982 issue of the journal Genre, though Greenblatt later preferred the phrase "cultural poetics."
| 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. There is no neutral vantage point outside the archive |
| 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 central metaphor: cultural power does not flow in one direction (from "above" to "below") but circulates — texts absorb, transform, and redistribute the energies of their culture |
| Power and subversion | New Historicists are especially interested in the relationship between power and resistance. Does literature subvert the dominant order, or does it ultimately reinforce it? |
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. The anecdote is not decorative; it is meant to make the strangeness of the past visible and to refuse the tidy generalisations of old-style "background."
Example: In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980), Greenblatt examines how figures in the period — including Othello and Iago, in his chapter on "The Improvisation of Power" — construct identity in response to the cultural codes available to them. Othello's self-fashioning, his careful presentation of himself as both noble general and Christian convert, makes him acutely vulnerable to Iago's "improvisation," the opportunistic exploitation of another's self-narrative. The reading shows identity in the period as something made under cultural pressure, not given.
A point of accuracy to get right. The phrase "the circulation of social energy" is not from Renaissance Self-Fashioning; it is the governing argument and subtitle of Greenblatt's later book, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988). It is worth attributing precisely: self-fashioning belongs to the 1980 book, social energy to the 1988 one. Students who fuse the two into a single mis-dated formula give themselves away; getting it right is a small but real AO5 marker of genuine reading. (This corrects a looseness common in revision guides, which often pin "social energy" to the more famous 1980 title.)
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, whose co-edited collection Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985) is the movement's manifesto. Where New Historicism grew out of Foucault and American Renaissance scholarship, Cultural Materialism grew out of British Marxism, Gramsci, and Williams's lifelong project of treating culture as a material practice rather than a realm of timeless value.
| 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?" |
For your purposes, the most useful way to hold the distinction is by their characteristic verbs and tenses. New Historicism tends to ask what a text did in its own moment — how it absorbed and recirculated the anxieties of its time — and to conclude, often, that it contained more than it changed. Cultural Materialism tends to ask what a text can do now — in performance, in the classroom, in protest — and to conclude that its political life is unfinished. The first is, by temperament, historical and a little pessimistic; the second is presentist and frankly activist about it. Neither is "correct," and the strongest essays do not pick a side so much as use the two as a pair of pincers, letting the New Historicist question about a text's original work and the Cultural Materialist question about its present use close in on the same evidence from opposite directions.
| 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 |
| Approach | Application |
|---|---|
| New Historicist | Read Othello alongside contemporary documents about Moors, Turks, and Venice — and against the fact of a Moorish embassy to Elizabeth's court in 1600, a few years before the play. The play participates in the cultural negotiation of racial identity in early modern England. Othello's fate — the exotic outsider who is simultaneously admired and destroyed — registers the ambivalence of English encounters with racial difference |
| Cultural Materialist | Ask: how has Othello been USED politically? In apartheid South Africa, where stage kisses between races were taboo, performances of the play were charged with danger. In contemporary Britain, it is read in relation to debates about racism, immigration, and multiculturalism. The text's "meaning" is not sealed in 1604 but produced afresh by each political context that deploys it |
To see New Historicism and Cultural Materialism working as readings rather than as positions, take the play's opening assault on Brabantio. Iago, hidden in the dark, shouts up at the senator's window:
"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe."
A New Historicist does not treat this as a private slur invented by a stage villain. The image draws on, and recirculates, a stock of cultural energy that was already in motion in early modern London — the association of blackness with the diabolical and the bestial, the anxiety about miscegenation, the linkage of sexual and racial transgression. Iago is, in Greenblatt's terms, improvising with materials his culture has supplied; the shock of the line depends on a charge the audience already carries. The play does not invent the prejudice; it puts it into circulation, intensifies it, and — this is the crux of the New Historicist question — possibly contains it, by letting the audience watch racism do its destructive work inside the safe frame of the theatre. Does that framing expose the prejudice or merely vent it harmlessly? The reading leaves the question open, which is itself the New Historicist signature.
A Cultural Materialist presses harder on the politics, and on the present. The same line, in a 1604 playhouse, a 1965 production with a blacked-up Laurence Olivier, and a twenty-first-century staging with a Black actor as Othello and a white Iago spitting the words up at the gallery, does not "mean" the same thing — because its meaning is produced in the act of performance and reception, not fixed at composition. Dollimore and Sinfield would ask not "what did Shakespeare intend?" but "what work does this text do now, in our struggle over race?" — and would argue that the line's power to disturb a modern audience is evidence that literature can be a genuine site of political contest, not merely a safety valve. The two readings share every word of the evidence and divide precisely on the question of containment versus dissidence — which is exactly the friction you can put to work for AO5.
| Approach | Application |
|---|---|
| New Historicist | Read the novel alongside the political currents of the 1980s American Religious Right — the rise of the Moral Majority, the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, the anti-abortion movement. The novel does not merely "reflect" these movements — it participates in the cultural struggle over women's rights by extrapolating their ideology to its conclusion |
| Cultural Materialist | The novel's meaning has shifted since 1985. After 2016, The Handmaid's Tale underwent a dramatic cultural revival, the red cloaks adopted as a symbol of feminist protest. A Cultural Materialist would argue the novel's "meaning" is not fixed in 1985 but is actively produced by each new historical moment |
Atwood herself supplies a methodological gift to the New Historicist: she has often noted that she allowed nothing into Gilead that had not happened somewhere, at some time, in human history. This is the participation principle made into a compositional rule. Gilead is not invented prejudice but a recombination of existing cultural materials — the forced surrogacy of biblical Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah, the public executions and bodies displayed on the Wall, the reproductive policing and renaming of enslaved peoples, the colour-coded uniforms of real theocratic and totalitarian regimes. A New Historicist reading takes a single detail — say, the Ceremony's scriptural alibi, the Commander reading "Give me children, or else I die" before ritualised rape — and shows it circulating the authority of scripture into the service of state violence, exactly as certain real movements have deployed sacred text to govern women's bodies. The novel does not report this discourse; it intensifies it until its cruelty is unmissable.
The Cultural Materialist completes the picture by attending to deployment and to form. The "Historical Notes" — the academic symposium of 2195 at which Professor Pieixoto reconstructs and patronises Offred's recovered tapes — stage, within the book, the very process by which a culture decides what a woman's testimony means. Pieixoto's donnish jokes and his greater interest in identifying the Commander than in hearing the woman dramatise reception itself as an exercise of power. And the novel's afterlife confirms the Cultural Materialist's central claim: a text written as a warning in 1985 became, decades later, a costume of protest in the streets — its meaning produced not once by Atwood but repeatedly by each new political moment that takes it up. The two readings divide on the familiar axis: does the framing of the "Historical Notes" finally contain Offred's protest within complacent scholarship, or does the novel's living political use prove that literature can do genuinely dissident work its first moment never exhausted?
The central debate in both New Historicism and Cultural Materialism is the relationship between subversion and containment:
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