Cultural Materialism

For much of the twentieth century, idealist accounts sought to represent culture as 'pure' consciousness, while materialist accounts represented it as a secondary 'effect' of some other material reality. From the 1970s, however, new theoretical paradigms have sought rather to establish the materiality of culture itself. The term 'cultural materialism', coined by Raymond Williams, describes this emergent body of cultural theory.


Cultural Materialism is both an introduction and a contribution to cultural theory. It situates cultural materialism in relation to earlier paradigms such as literary humanism and Marxism. It explains how the new paradigm has been applied to important areas such as cultural studies, media studies and literary studies. It explores the more significant differences between British and French variants in the paradigm: Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson and the Birmingham School in Britain, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault in France.