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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

so, however, on either English literature or cultural studies.
For English literature this has been—in part, no doubt—an effect
of the discipline’s notorious insularity. But it remains surprising,
if only because hermeneutics reproduces so many of English
literature’s characteristic tropes in more theoretically articulate
form. This is so precisely because they are each literary human-
isms. Noting the parallels between Gadamer and Eliot, Eagleton
has argued that both exhibit ‘a grossly complacent theory of
history’, in which ‘the alien is always secretly familiar’ (Eagleton,
1996, p. 73). Thus the affinity between English literature and
German hermeneutics seems almost to have forewarned and fore-
armed British cultural studies against the latter. But the German
tradition is neither so fixated on the author nor so insistently elitist
as British cultural studies has sometimes supposed. Hans Robert
Jauss (1922–97), for example, developed a post-Gadamerian
‘aesthetic of reception’ able to theorise the role of the reader as
well as that of the author (Jauss, 1982). And though Jauss himself
remained preoccupied with ‘high’ literature, his methods are
applicable to popular texts, at least in principle. Indeed, there is
no necessary connection between hermeneutics and high culture.
If the texts of popular culture have meaning, as clearly they do,
then they can be made available to hermeneutic analysis.

BRITISH CULTURALISM: FROM ARNOLD TO LEAVIS

In its British formation—or perhaps more properly its English
formation—culturalism remains similarly indebted to Romanti-
cism and historicism, but not to hermeneutics. The classic account
of the historical evolution of this British culturalist tradition is
Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society 1780–1950. As we have
seen, a central motif in culturalist theory is the necessary antith-
esis between culture and civilisation. In Culture and Society,
Williams traces the history of the concept ‘culture’ as it developed
in British intellectual life from Edmund Burke (1729–97) to George
Orwell (1903–50). At its inception, this ‘culture and society’ tradition
was very obviously indebted to its German counterpart: at least
two of the central figures in Williams’ lineage, Thomas Carlyle

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