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Contemporary Cultural Theory

form, he continues, ‘is in effect a pre-emergence, active and pressing
but not yet fully articulated’ (p. 126). The concept of structure of
feeling is brought back into play at this point: these ‘can be
defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other
social semantic formations which have been precipitated’
(pp. 133–4). In short, structures of feeling are quite specifically
counter-hegemonic. Williams remained insistent, moreover, that
there is much in any lived culture that cannot be reduced to the
dominant: ‘no dominant culture’, he wrote, ‘ever in reality includes
or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention’
(p. 125). As Higgins rightly observes, this stress on human agency
is part of the ‘clearly defined conceptual content’ of Williams’
cultural materialism (Higgins, 1999, p. 172). It is also very distinc-
tively ‘culturalist’ in character.

Dollimore and Sinfield
Cultural materialism has been widely influential in literary and
cultural studies. It has influenced the recognisably feminist
cultural materialism of Terry Lovell, for example, or Janet Wolff
(Lovell, 1987; Wolff, 1990; Wolff, 1993). It informs the work of
Nicholas Garnham and his colleagues at the University of West-
minster, who co-edit the journal Media, Culture and Society.
Garnham himself has explicitly identified his work with ‘what
is coming to be called... cultural materialism’ (Garnham, 1983,
p. 321; cf. Garnham, 1988). In literary studies, Jonathan Dollimore
and Alan Sinfield are both self-proclaimed ‘cultural materialists’.
Dollimore and Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare, significantly sub-
titled Essays in Cultural Materialism (Dollimore & Sinfield, 1994),
has proven so influential in Shakespeare studies as to prompt the
large claim that ‘cultural materialism in Britain and New
Historicism in America... now constitute the new academic
order...in Renaissance studies’ (Wilson, 1995, p. viii). As we
shall see, this American ‘New Historicism’ is rather different from
what Williams meant by ‘cultural materialism’. Their linking by
Wilson might, then, be read as indicative of how little Dollimore
and Sinfield actually owe to Williams. The claims of these rival
cultural materialisms have been much canvassed, with opinion

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