The Research On The Literary Thoughts Of Cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism is a genre of literary criticism that rose in the late1970s and early1980s in Britain. It still has an important impact. This term was originally proposed by Raymond Williams in his work Marxism and Literature, which advocated by him as a "historical materialism of the production on the special nature of the material and cultural theory". Raymond Williams’s redefinition and division of culture laid a theoretical foundation for cultural materialism’s literary criticism. Meanwhile, he constructed a literature study method that combines material production with ideology. Since the1980s, literary critics of cultural materialism, represented by Dollimore, Sinfield, Brown, took Renaissance literary works as the research object, especially Shakespeare. They inherited Raymond Williams’s thoughts of literary criticism and absorbed Althusser and Foucault’s thoughts. They elaborated their own literary thoughts through a series of monographs and papers. Cultural materialism literary critics valued the interrelationships between literature and history, politics, society. They paid attention to the role of literature and literary production of the material conditions in shaping ideology. Literature was researched in the social and historical context. They also focused on literature’s operation in social mechanisms and its political effect. Cultural Materialism concentrates on researching political function of literature, often revealing the power to subvert the dominant ideology from the text."After the1990s, besides continuing to emphasis on Renaissance literature, the issues of gay and post-colonialism also began to be included in the vision." In particular, the issue of homosexuality drew the attention of cultural materialist literary critics.This paper has five parts, including the introduction, the literary thoughts of cultural materialism, an overview of cultural materialism, materiality poetics of cultural materialism and conclusion. The first part introduces the research status of cultural materialism’s literary thoughts and innovation, necessity, importance, possible of paper. The second part is the main body of the paper. This chapter introduces the overview of cultural materialism, elaborates literary thoughts of cultural materialism from four perspectives:research methodology, the concept of author, the concept of reception, literary criticism and the practice of literary criticism. Through the comparison of New Criticism, Marxist Literary Theory and some examples, this paper analyzes the uniqueness of cultural materialism’s literary thoughts. In this paper, materiality characteristic of cultural materialism is what we explore for, elaborating the material characteristics of the cultural materialism’s literary thoughts.Through literary thoughts of cultural materialism, we can see a new trend in contemporary western literary research. What’s more, it has a great significance on the overall understanding and studying of Marxist Literary Theory.