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Cultural materialism analyzes culture as inseparable from material production, economic systems, and historical conditions. Rather than treating literature as autonomous aesthetic objects, this approach examines how texts are shaped by and participate in material social relations, class systems, and power structures.
Marxist literary criticism gave you the foundational claim: the economic base of a society — its modes and relations of production — shapes its cultural superstructure, including literature, art, law, and religion. Cultural materialism inherits this claim but significantly complicates it. The term was coined by the Welsh critic Raymond Williams, who was dissatisfied with both orthodox Marxism (which treated culture as mere reflection of economic conditions) and liberal aestheticism (which treated literature as floating free of historical context entirely). Cultural materialism insists that culture is itself a form of material practice — not a passive mirror of social relations but an active participant in producing and contesting them.
Williams introduced a crucial set of distinctions that have become essential tools for materialist analysis. He described any culture as a combination of the dominant (the ruling ideology and its forms), the residual (older cultural practices and values that persist from previous historical formations), and the emergent (new meanings and practices that challenge the dominant order). In any given literary period, you can find all three in tension. Victorian literature, for instance, is dominantly bourgeois and imperialist, but it also carries residual aristocratic and feudal values (the country house, the gentleman) and emergent challenges to class hierarchy and gender restriction (in Brontë, in Hardy, in the nascent labor movement's cultural expressions).
This framework prevents the reductionism that critics of Marxist literary analysis often object to. Culture is not simply determined by economics; it has its own relative autonomy and its own specific effects. A novel does not merely reflect class struggle — it can intensify it, defuse it, displace it into other terms, or produce new forms of class consciousness. Cultural materialism thus asks of any text: what are the material conditions of its production (who published it, who bought it, what institutions supported or suppressed it)? What ideological work does it do? What forms of social life does it naturalize or challenge? These questions make it possible to read Shakespeare's history plays, for example, not as timeless reflections on power but as specific interventions in the late Elizabethan political landscape, with real stakes for real audiences embedded in real institutions.
The British school of cultural materialism — associated with Williams, but also with critics like Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield — distinguishes itself from American New Historicism partly through its explicitly political orientation. Where New Historicism tends toward a somewhat decentered, ironic view of how texts and historical contexts mutually constitute one another, cultural materialism maintains a more committed stance: it is not just interested in understanding power but in identifying and supporting the forms of culture that resist it. This makes cultural materialism both an analytical method and, for many of its practitioners, a political one.
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