Neema Parvini
Broadly speaking, new historicism and cultural materialism mark a shift in the discipline of English literature from a period in which the primary focus of criticism was the literary text to one in which the primary focus has been historical context. Although there had always been literary history, especially in studies of William Shakespeare’s works and literature from the early modern period, new historicists and cultural materialists distinguished themselves by bringing a diverse range of influences from anthropology, Marxism, theory of history, and continental philosophy to bear on their work to consider contextual questions from fresh new perspectives.
New historicism is chiefly an American (and specifically beginning at Berkeley) development in the study of early modern literature, which came to prominence in the early 1980s following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self‐Fashioning (1980). Cultural materialism, meanwhile, also initially focused on the early modern period, is chiefly a British development which came to prominence with the publication of Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (1984) and the collection of essays that Dollimore edited with Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare (1985). Because the two approaches emerged in the same area of the discipline, at roughly the same time—and in constant dialogue, often taking the opposite sides of debates—new historicism and cultural materialism have frequently been compared and contrasted (see Dollimore 1990; Felperin 1990), considered side by side (see Parvini 2012b: Brannigan 1998), or viewed as two sides of the same coin (see Hawthorn 1996; Bradshaw 1993; Vickers 1993; Levin 1990; Pechter 1987). In developing an understanding of either of them, it is important not to be bound by the artificial terms of this dichotomy, and to maintain a keen sense of their distinct geneses. Therefore, I will consider new historicism and cultural materialism in separate sections.
New historicism has been a hugely influential approach to literature, especially in studies of William Shakespeare’s works and literature of the early modern period. It began in earnest in 1980 and quickly supplanted New Criticism as the new orthodoxy in early modern studies. Despite many attacks from feminists, cultural materialists, and traditional scholars, it dominated the study of early modern literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, it has given way to a different, more materialist, form of historicism that some call “new new historicism,” or the “new materialism.” There have also been variants of “new historicism” in other periods of the discipline, most notably a distinct brand in the Romantic period (Liu 1989; McGann 1988, 1983; Levinson 1986), but its stronghold has always remained in the Renaissance. At its core, new historicism insists—contra formalism—that literature must be understood in its historical context. This is because it views literary texts as cultural products that are rooted in their time and place, not works of individual genius that transcend them. New historicist essays are thus often notable for making seemingly unlikely linkages between various different cultural products and literary texts. Its “newness” is at once an echo of the New Criticism it replaced, and a recognition of an “old” historicism, often (though by no means exclusively) exemplified by E. M. W. Tillyard (1942), against which it defines itself.
In its earliest iteration, new historicism was primarily a method of power analysis strongly influenced by the anthropological studies of Clifford Geertz (1973), modes of torture and punishment described by Michel Foucault (1977), and methods of ideological control outlined by Louis Althusser (1971). This can be seen most visibly in new historicist work of the early 1980s such as Jonathan Goldberg’s James I and the Politics of Literature (1983), or Leonard Tennenhouse’s Power on Display (1986). These works came to view the Tudor and early Stuart states as being almost insurmountable absolutist monarchies in which the scope of individual agency or political subversion appeared remote. This version of new historicism is frequently, and erroneously, taken to represent its entire enterprise. In his famous essay, “Invisible Bullets,” Stephen Greenblatt (1988) argued that power often produces its own subversive elements in order to contain it—and so what appears to be subversion is actually the final victory of containment. This became known as the hard version of the containment thesis, and it was attacked and critiqued by many commentators (Bradshaw 1993; Vickers 1993; Lehan 1990; Levin 1990; Felperin 1990; Boose 1987; Cohen 1987; Pechter 1987) as leaving too little room for the possibility of real change or agency. This was the major departure point of the cultural materialists (Dollimore 1990), who sought a more dynamic model of culture that afforded greater opportunities for dissidence. Later new historicist studies such as Louis Montrose’s The Purpose of Playing (1996) sought to complicate the hard version of the containment thesis to facilitate a more flexible, heterogeneous and dynamic view of culture.
The three most influential theoretical works on new historicism have undoubtedly been Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977). New historicism can therefore be seen as a fusion of literary criticism, historical anthropology (following Geertz), postmodern historiography (following White), and power‐discourse analysis (following Foucault). These are all complex works; in the interests of space, I distil the key ideas as they pertain to new historicist theory and practice into a set of bullet points:
Generally speaking, then, new historicism is a form of anti‐humanism, because it tends to view individuals—à la both Geertz and Foucault—as entirely products of their time and place with few if any useful natural instincts that are not culturally induced. New historicism is also a form of anti‐positivism, because, following White, the certainty of ever establishing “true” or “objective” knowledge is always frustrated, and the traditional view of scholarship as impartially marshalling evidence towards this end exposed as a self‐deluding myth.
Using tools borrowed from Geertz, White, and Foucault, new historicists came to specialise in writing essays in a peculiar form. They would very often begin with an eccentric historical anecdote that reveals some fundamental aspect of early modern culture. The new historicist essay is marked by its unexpected turns and by the apparently arbitrary linkages made between anecdotes, cultural artifacts, and literary texts. The most famous new historicist essay, Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets,” demonstrates all of these features, as do a pair of exemplary essays by Louis Montrose (1980 and 1983). The logic of the anecdote rests on its status as synecdoche—a part of culture standing in for the whole culture—which itself rests on the assumption that culture coheres in this way as would a poem or literary text. Culture may be heterogeneous, but in the final analysis each of its disparate parts tells us something about its essential makeup. This also accounts for the fact that the connections made by new historicists are often seemingly arbitrary rather than logical—a tendency for which they were criticized by numerous commentators (Parvini 2012b; Kastan 1999; Lehan 1990; Cohen 1987). Other commentators (Papadopoulou 2013; Laden 2004; Hidalgo 2001; MacDonald 1994) have praised new historicists, especially Stephen Greenblatt, for this seemingly playful aspect of his critical practice which renders him à la White as much a storyteller as a critic. The anecdote also crucially gives scope to tell stories outside the purview of traditional history, to recover marginalized or lost voices, to produce “counter histories” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000), which is a term borrowed from Fernand Braudel who insisted on focusing his history not on the ruling classes but rather on the structures of everyday life (1981). We might thus consider the following five‐point definition of new historicism’s basic theoretical assumptions:
As the 1980s wore on, in the USA, new historicism became the new orthodoxy in the discipline, especially in the study of early modern literature and Shakespeare’s plays. Studies such as Stephen Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage (1988) and Leah Marcus’s Puzzling Shakespeare (1988) demonstrated the movement at its most daring and cutting edge, transforming plays by considering them in new and unusual topical and geographical contexts. Vocal feminist resistance to the movement (Greene 1991; Neely 1988; Boose 1987) gave way to the feminist appropriation and absorption of new historicist assumptions and approaches (Howard and Rackin 1997; Erikson 1991).
As I have mentioned, new historicism was attacked many times almost from the moment of its inception. Space does not permit me to delve into all of these criticisms, but I touch on two of the most salient. First, feminists such as Lynda Boose argued that new historicism was too focused on males in power, and in insisting so readily on the absoluteness of that power, effectively shut down the scope for female agency (Boose 1987). Carol Thomas Neely put the problem very plainly:
New historicism’s insistence on the textuality of history and the intertextuality of literature and other texts has brought into the discourse a wide range of fascinating period texts, brilliantly explicated. But these texts, more often than not, are much like or even identical with those favoured by old historical critics. They are male, upper class, hierarchical, prescriptive, virtually literary
(Neely 1988: 8).
Second, older, more traditional scholars, complained vehemently about their maverick scholarly practices. The problems of these more traditional scholars were many, and I have summarized their chief complaints against new historicism as follows:
Although critics such as Edward Pechter, Richard Levin, Brian Vickers, and Graham Bradshaw were voicing opinions that were seen to be unfashionable at the time, in the period since they were writing, many of these critiques of new historicism have endured and, indeed, resurfaced under a slightly different guise.
In the 1990s, the fierce attacks and fervent theoretical debates that had defined new historicism’s first decade gave way to wide‐scale adoption and reprinting in various anthologies (Ryan 1996; Veeser 1994, 1989; Wilson and Dutton 1992, Greenblatt 1988b), as well as the professional elevation of its foremost practitioners.
Over time, the “newness” of new historicist innovations fell somewhat out of sight, and the mantra to “always historicize” became something of an institutional dogma. After new historicism was entrenched as the new orthodoxy its shortcomings as historical scholarship were frequently highlighted and a later generation of literary historians sought to restore some of the scholarly norms that its often maverick studies eschewed. For example, in After Theory (1999), David Scott Kastan sought to turn from theory towards history, and replace new historicism with a much more conventional historical criticism rooted in details and hard evidence. Its call for “a greater delight in particularity” (Kastan 1999: 13) was realized almost immediately by Patricia Fumerton’s collection Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (1999), which announced itself as the “new new historicism” (although the term “new materialism” is now much more commonly used). Much influenced by Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), the critics in this collection view as problematic the singular anecdote as synecdoche and replace it with “multifarious supporting details” (Fumerton 1999: 4). Here, the White‐inspired textualism of the older new historicism, along with its Foucauldian focus on ideology and power, is replaced with the material and physical.
Work carried out in this vein was refined and perfected later in studies such as Natasha Korda’s Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies (2002) and Jonathan Gill Harris’s Sick Economies (2003). Some commentaries, for example, Douglas Bruster’s Shakespeare and the Question of Culture (2003), have been skeptical of these developments viewing its relentless focus on the material object as a fetishist form of “tchotchke criticism” (Bruster 2003: 203), a critique later echoed by others (Parvini 2017: 117–30; Parvini 2014; Garber 2008). A more forceful critique of the materialist turn in recent historicist studies can be found in David Hawkes’s “Against Materialism in Literary Theory” (2011), in which he accuses scholars working in this vein of a near‐automatic complicity with capitalism. Others such as Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (2007) and Evelyn Gajowksi (2010), fearful of the antiquarian and apolitical bent of much of this “new new historicist” work have argued for a new “presentism,” that is a wholescale rejection of the historicist project.
During the twentieth century, there had been in Britain a stronger tradition of critical thought from the radical left, especially thinkers who wrote for the New Left Review such as Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Terry Eagleton, than in the USA. Cultural materialism arose from this broader intellectual milieu, building on and in some cases challenging the ideas of the older generation of Marxists. Accordingly, cultural materialism has always taken on a much more political and confrontational tone and character than new historicism. If new historicism concerns itself with better understanding the past for the sake of academic interest, cultural materialism concerns itself with better understanding the political present as mediated through the past for the sake of changing that present. Where new historicists tended to see containment and the triumph of power, cultural materialists saw ideological contradictions and therein the scope for dissidence and subversion.
The work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield is firmly rooted in Marxist theory; their three most prominent influences are Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Louis Althusser. I distil the key ideas as follows:
Like new historicism, then, cultural materialism draws on anti‐humanist theories that view human beings almost exclusively as the structural products of power. However, by using Gramsci and Williams as a basis, their view of culture is more fluid and heterogeneous than that found in new historicism even in its most advanced form (“cultural poetics”). This is because the dominant group never has a fully secure grip on power, and can never be fully sure of its hegemony over subordinate groups. Even if, à la Althusser, ideology works covertly and invisibly to reproduce labor power in its subjects, there is so much scope for fissures, cracks, and contradictions between the various competing ideologies of subcultures that the state is almost always subject to internal subversion. The most fully realized version of this argument appears in Sinfield’s Faultlines (1992).
Cultural materialists spend a lot of their time, energy, and focus on repudiating older (essentialist, liberal) humanist readings of Shakespeare’s plays. For example Dollimore (1984) seeks to overturn long‐standing arguments that King Lear is a play about “universal pain” (Knight 1930: 199) by showing that it is actually inextricably bound up with questions of property rights. In his ground‐zero introduction to Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis unleashes a tour‐de‐force attack on generations of previous scholars and critics including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A. C. Bradley, Ernest Jones, J. I. M. Stewart, Kenneth Muir, John Bayley, Frank Kermode, M. C. Bradbrook, E. E. Stoll, Alfred Harbage, S. L. Bethell, E. M. W. Tillyard, Wilbur Sanders, Helen Gardner, G. Wilson Knight, and L. C. Knights. He takes time to expose how each of these writers gave us a conservative, idealistic and romanticized view of Shakespeare (1985). Graham Holderness (1992), meanwhile, specifically critiques Tillyard not only for mistaking official Tudor state ideology for everyday belief, but also, along with J. Dover Wilson, and other scholars from the 1940s, for using Shakespeare to further a patriotic, nationalist agenda during the war effort. This contextual and political demystification of old scholarship and criticism, showing it up for what it was, is a classic cultural materialist move.
For cultural materialists, these are not trivial academic affairs, but live issues that have stakes and consequences in the real world. For example, a conservative vision of Shakespeare—such as that advanced by Tillyard or Dover Wilson—reproduced through the state apparatuses of education, namely in schools and universities around the world, works insidiously to universalize, normalize, and naturalize that which is ideologically partial. In other words we cannot pretend as those earlier generations of critics did that Shakespeare’s sectional interests represent everybody’s interests. Shakespeare was white, male, middle class, patronized by royalty, and from a nation with colonial ambitions. Perhaps even more importantly, he was later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, read by members of an elite (white, male) ruling class of a nation that had largely fulfilled its colonial ambitions. His reputation developed to become the national bard embedded into school curricula, not only across Great Britain, but also across its empire. The very teaching of Shakespeare, therefore, became yet another tool of ideology reproducing itself at the level of individuals. The dominant mode of essentialist humanist criticism that Drakakis had attacked, in general, served to silence the marginalized interests of subordinate groups: women, the working classes, homosexuals, people of various other races and from other nations. Indeed, cultural materialism in many ways encouraged students to “to read with their genitals, argue with their background, or theorize with their skin colour” (Wilson 1995: 21). A three‐point definition of cultural materialist assumptions is therefore as follows:
Because of its political commitment to marginalized groups and subcultures, cultural materialism can be seen as the branching‐off point for a number of related developments: studies that focus on sexual dissidence which utilize queer theory, materialist feminism, postcolonialism, and race studies. Many studies from the 1990s carried out under those various different headings were broadly conducted in a cultural materialist framework.
As with new historicism, cultural materialism was subject to critique and attack, although commentators, such as Pechter, Levin, Vickers, or Bradshaw, had a habit of lumping them together with new historicists as part of the same theoretical and methodological coin. The salient complaints from these critics and others, are listed below, which comes out of my own critique of cultural materialism as an approach to literature:
For the most part, debates over the key ideas at stake in cultural materialism have rather slipped away. Either key cultural materialist tenets are so assimilated as to be taken for granted, or else scholars and critics feel that we have “moved on” from the moment of high theory when such debates were de rigueur. That is to say, some Shakespeareans would now much prefer to talk about hats, clocks, food, coins, items of furniture, the contents of cupboards, and so on, than to work out the finer points of the differences between Gramsci, Althusser and Williams. More on this in a moment.
Perhaps because of its more confrontational character, though still very successful, cultural materialism was not quite as all‐conquering in the UK during the 1990s as new historicism was in the USA. There are three possible reasons for this: first, because as mentioned in the introduction, cultural materialism was all too often seen simply as the British variant of new historicism. Second, because it was somewhat cannibalized or overshadowed by its own children: politically motivated studies into sexual dissidence, gender, postcolonialism, or race, which were cultural materialist in all but name, came to be classed under the new heading rather than under “cultural materialism.” And, finally, because some prominent universities in the UK, especially Oxbridge, always remained somewhat hostile to theory and maintained their own traditional archival practices—which, I would note, make rather better bedfellows with the new materialism than they ever did with cultural materialism. As a result, cultural materialism has arguably suffered a similar fate to new historicism: silently assimilated into the “new materialism,” which—as we’ve seen—shares few if any of its commitments to Marxist theory or political change. Dollimore himself has complained about the general shift from “big questions” to “little questions” in work carried out under the banner of new materialism (Dollimore 2012; see also Parvini 2014). In many ways, the real inheritors of the cultural materialist political project have been the presentists, such as Terence Hawkes, Hugh Grady, or Evelyn Gajowski, who remain committed to using scholarship and education to bring about social change.
The discipline of English literature—especially early modern and Shakespeare studies—is still coming to terms with the legacies of both new historicism and cultural materialism: what did they teach us, which theoretical assumptions and practices should we inherit, which should we question? In some crucial respects, these are the most important questions for the future direction of English studies, especially as new materialism—which can at times appear either hostile to questions of theory or else unreflective about its prevailing practices—becomes ever more dominant. Both new historicism and cultural materialism were marked, in their initial instances, by boldness and originality: a willingness to take on and challenge current orthodoxies. If we are ever to move beyond the “tchotchke criticism” that Bruster, Hawkes, and others have complained about, it will take a new generation of scholars and critics to do the same.