New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

John Brannigan. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. ix + 249 pp. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. A central theme of John Brannigan's usefully compact critical survey of and involves the important contributions these critical schools have made to ongoing discussions of the circulation of power. Brannigan makes a convincing case that between 1980 and 1986 the new historicism of such American critics as Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Stephen Orgel, and D. A. Miller emerged as a fairly consolidated tradition, possessed of its own well-defined set of concerns and problematics, and even its own house journal, Representations. While highlighting the methodological distinctions among various practitioners, Brannigan nonetheless approvingly cites H. Aram Veeser's general characterization of historicist tenets: every expressive act (including contemporary criticism) embedded in a network of material practices and thus and non-literary 'texts' circulate inseparably (71). (Brannigan dismisses Greenblatt's preference for the term cultural poetics as mere posturing, although he acknowledges that the label may be more precise.) The term cultural materialism refers to the work of British critics including Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and Catherine Belsey, who share many of the concerns of their Yankee counterparts, but who work by analysing the material existence of ideology, concentrated in the study of literary (12). Both schools emerged during the 1980s; both resist humanist idealism and formalist methodology and reject facile distinctions between history and representation; and both initially targeted the mobilization of ideological self-regulation and the noncoercive production of consent during the Renaissance. Designed in large part as a pedagogical introduction for students of literary theory, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism thoroughly and effectively summarizes the distinctive features of each school, outlines their institutional and publication histories, and glosses both the founding theorists (Michael Foucault and Clifford Geertz for the historicists, Raymond Williams for the materialists) as well as the key critical (Brannigan appends a useful annotated bibliography of important essays and books). For Brannigan, the primary difference between the two schools hinges on the problem of containment: New historicists typically examine the functions and representations of power, and focus on the ways in which power contains any potential subversion. Cultural materialists, to the contrary, look for ways in which defiance, subversion, dissidence, resistance, all forms of political opposition, are articulated, represented and performed. (108) Whatever the emphasis, and have not only revitalized Renaissance studies (and to some extent Victorian and American literary and studies), but many of the assumptions Brannigan attributes to these schools have become almost commonsensical in journals and classrooms. Many of us now tend to read literary as material products of specific historical conditions and assume that texts of all kinds are the vehicles of politics insofar as mediate the fabric of social, political and formations (3). Yet such formulae raise as many questions as they put to rest, and in particular has generated a considerable amount of skeptical response. Brannigan cites these criticisms in passing, but his elaborations of many of the arguments are underdeveloped. A primary lament is the peculiarly disabling model of power developed by Greenblatt and his camp followers, a model according to which there is no effective space of resistance (8). As Brannigan notes, for example, Carolyn Porter has charged that the historicist model of generalized power works to reduce heterogeneous historical events, texts, and performances to predictable operations of a presumably homogenous and universal power. …