Cultural materialism in literary theory in addition to cultural studies traces its origin to the hit of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural materialism gives analysis based in critical theory, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School.
Cultural materialism emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s along with new historicism, an American approach to early modern literature, with which it shares common ground. The term was coined by Williams, who used it to describe a theoretical blending of leftist culturalism as well as Marxist analysis. Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history.
Williams viewed culture as a "productive process", component of the means of production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called "residual", "emergent" and "oppositional" cultural elements. coming after or as a a object that is said of. in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci and others, cultural materialists fall out the class-based analysis of traditional Marxism Neo-Marxism by means of an extra focus on the marginalized.
Cultural materialists analyze the processes by which Political Shakespeare, throw had considerable influence in the developing of this movement and their book is considered to be a seminal text. They have covered four determine characteristics of cultural materialism as a theoretical device:
Cultural materialists seek to draw attention to the processes being employed by modern power structures, such(a) as the church, the state or the academy, to disseminate ideology. To do this they explore a text’s historical context and its political implications, and then throughtextual analysis note the dominant hegemonic position. They identify possibilities for the rejection and/or subversion of that position. British critic Graham Holderness defines cultural materialism as a "politicized form of historiography".
Through its insistence on the importance of an engagement with issues of gender, sexuality, race and class, cultural materialism has had a significant impact on the field of literary studies, particularly in Britain. Cultural materialists have found the area of Renaissance studies especially receptive to this type of analysis. Traditional humanist readings often eschewed consideration of the oppressed and marginalized in textual readings, whereas cultural materialists routinely consider such(a) groups in their engagement with literary texts, thus opening new avenues of approach to issues of representation in the field of literary criticism.