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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

representations can and should be measured against the histor-
ical referents to which they really do sometimes bear some
relation. In the opening chapter of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger,
for example, Eagleton moves between the text of Wuthering
Heights, the historical reality of the Irish Famine and its repre-
sentation and non-representation in subsequent historiographical
and literary texts (Eagleton, 1995).
This substantial body of work suggests the uses to which
cultural materialism can be put in hands as creative as Eagleton’s.
The latter’s own judgement warrants repetition here: ‘the notion
of cultural materialism is ...of considerable value . . . it extends
and completes Marx’s own struggle against idealism, carrying it
forcefully into that realm (“culture”) always most ideologically
resistant to materialist redefinition’. Though Eagleton still insisted
on the general priority of historical materialism, he nonetheless
conceded that a ‘cultural materialist concern for . . . social and
material conditions . . . carried into the academic institutions,
would make the most profound difference to what actually got
done there’ (Eagleton, 1989, p. 169). Moreover, Eagleton now sees
Williams’ stress on the institutional prerequisites of a properly
common culture as one of the latter’s most powerful insights.
‘Whereas for Eliot the culture is common in content’, he writes,
‘its commonness for Williams lies chiefly in its political form’. The
power and the paradox of Williams’ position, Eagleton argues, is
in its recognition that cultural diversity actually requires for its
achievement the kind of common belief and action necessary
for the creation of common institutions. ‘To establish genuine
cultural pluralism’, he continues, ‘requires concerted socialist
action. It is precisely this that contemporary pluralism fails to see.
Williams’ position would no doubt seem to it quaintly residual,
not to say positively archaic; the problem in fact is that we have
yet to catch up with it’ (Eagleton, 2000, p. 122).

NEW HISTORICISM

New historicism shares with cultural materialism a conception
of culture as material practice. As we have noted, the two are often

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