ABSTRACT
My friend and colleague Andrew Hadfield alleges in 2003 that cultural materialism has become ‘ever more ossified, predictable and institutionalized’. There comes a time, he adds, when a theory ‘ceases to be radical and even properly theoretical, because it has become hegemonic and inscribed within the academic culture at large’.1 Concurrently, Nick Groom, reviewing a new edition of my book Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, wonders whether there is life left in cultural materialism. It is time to ‘raise the question, whither Marxist literary theory?’ (Groom 2005). Yet there is little agreement about what should happen instead. Hadfield’s idea is that we would do better history, and better politics, through a more localized kind of historical study, attending more closely to ‘the sorts of issues which characterized political discussion’ in the period, rather than importing modern constructs (2003: 465). Jonathan Bate is on a different tack. He declares on a BBC radio talk-show:
The old sort of Marxist and feminist criticism, that’s all gone, it belongs to the last century. The next big thing is going to be people beginning to ask questions about whether we can actually find out what goes on in the brain, physically, when we respond aesthetically to a work of art . . . Whether the brain is doing something different responding to a Shakespeare sonnet as opposed to a rhyme on a Christmas card.
