ABSTRACT
Students and professors in the United States often ask me to explain cultural materialism. This is mainly because it comes up in discussions of new historicism-either as a lamentable extreme toward which new historicism declines, or as the positive vision which it fails to attain. This is partly because the success of new historicism in North America derives from its vagueness; it covers most clever work that is not celebrating the unity of the-text-on-the-page. However, cultural materialism cannot adequately be understood as a variation on new historicism. It is a response, within British Marxism and Cultural Studies, to broader historical circumstances.
