ABSTRACT

A fundamental precept of Marxist cultural analysis is that superstructures of thought and artistic expression rest upon and derive from a material base rooted in social and economic reality. Thus, each historical era creates characteristic forms of expression and explanatory discourse that reflect, indeed construct, the social reality of the period. Lewis Mumford spoke to this process when, in The City in History (1961), he wrote that in “the Book of Job, one beholds Jerusalem; in Plato, Sophocles, and Euripides, Athens; in Shakespeare and Marlowe . . . Elizabethan London.”