Raymond Williams and cultural materialist tradition argue that culture (including literature) is not a reflection of economic base but actively produces meaning and participates in material life. Literature is a cultural practice intertwined with social struggle; critical reading examines both what a text represents and how it participates in contestations over power.
You know from your study of ideology and hegemony that dominant classes maintain power partly through cultural means — securing consent by making contingent social arrangements appear natural and universal. Cultural materialism, developed by Raymond Williams in response to classical Marxism, accepts this insight but challenges the model of culture it implies. Traditional Marxist base/superstructure theory treats economic relations as the "real" determinant of history, and culture (art, literature, law, religion) as "superstructure" — a secondary reflection of that material base. Williams argued that this gets it wrong: culture is not merely a mirror held up to economic life. It is itself a material practice with its own productive power, capable of creating new meanings, contesting dominant values, and changing social conditions from within.
The key concept Williams introduces is the distinction between dominant, residual, and emergent culture. At any historical moment, a culture is not unified — it is a field of competing forces. Dominant culture is what the ruling class presents as universal, natural, and timeless. Residual culture consists of older values and practices that persist from an earlier social formation (the chivalric code in post-medieval culture, for instance), sometimes incorporated into the dominant, sometimes genuinely oppositional. Emergent culture consists of new meanings and practices being actively produced — sometimes truly alternative to the dominant, sometimes merely new expressions of it. Literature participates in all three registers: a text can reproduce dominant values while simultaneously carrying residual alternatives or emergent challenges. Cultural materialism reads texts for these tensions rather than for unified meaning.
What makes this approach specifically materialist is its insistence on the conditions of cultural production. Literature is not produced by disembodied imagination; it is produced by historically situated writers under specific economic conditions (patronage, the publishing market, the academy), using tools (genres, conventions, language) that are themselves historical products of social life. Williams coined the term structures of feeling to describe the lived, affective texture of a particular historical period — the characteristic patterns of feeling and consciousness that precede their articulation in explicit ideology. Literature often captures structures of feeling before they harden into doctrine, which is why literary study is not merely a supplement to social history but an indispensable source for understanding social life from the inside.
The political stakes of cultural materialism are explicitly interventionist. Critics like Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield — who developed the English "cultural materialist" school — argued that canonical texts like Shakespeare's plays were not simply universal treasures but ideological constructs that had been mobilized to support particular social values. Rather than reading "with" the dominant ideology, cultural materialist criticism reads "against the grain" — excavating contradictions, recovering marginalized perspectives, and showing how texts that appear conservative may contain the seeds of their own subversion. The goal is not just interpretation but transformation: understanding how culture participates in power as a precondition for contesting it.
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