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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. By John Brannigan. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. viii + 249 pages.
As university presses diminish production of scholarly monographs on literary criticism--as critical readings of major literary texts and authors actually scare off acquisition editors looking more and more for "cross over" projects--the production and marketing of the theory primer or handbook seems to be expanding. St. Martin's Press has aggressively pursued this end, furnishing students, through its Casebooks in Contemporary Criticism series, with many useful and high-quality critical editions of the great western texts replete with model critical readings and supplementary essays treating theoretical schools. The St. Martin's Transitions series extends this territory into purely theoretical subjects themselves; John Brannigan's New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, one of the early titles in the series, dedicates itself, too, to bringing contemporary theory and criticism to both undergraduate students and more advanced scholars of literature and theory in lucid, even vibrant, chords.
In sum, the book strikes an admirable pose between clean-slate introduction and sophisticated cultural critique of American new historicism and British cultural materialism--two dominant and perhaps over-glamorized, current critical approaches which centralize, as Brannigan summarizes again and again, the reading of history as if it were a literary text itself. History is not prior to or privileged over literature; it is a way of understanding cultures and peoples as if they were themselves literary, textual, and narrative processes, while literature itself is only a symptom of historical forces. Such is as basic a definition of new historical or cultural material inquiry as one could wish for, and Brannigan rehashes this definition at almost every turn, for the book resounds with thoroughness and systematicity. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism provides lots of basic definitions in an introductory section; recapitulates these throughout succeeding chapters on the conceptual sources of new historicism and cultural materialism (in Marxism and in the "genealogical" analysis developed by Michel Foucault) and in core chapters on the major players in these domains (who are largely Renaissance literary scholars); speculates about the fate of these prominent critical orientations; and provides four model essays applying these approaches to some canonically major works (Heart of Darkness, "The Yellow Wallpaper," some of Tennyson's poems, and Yeats's "Easter 1916").
As one might expect from such an ambitious architecture--balancing the advanced and the introductory--New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (hereafter NHCM) sometimes wavers in its sense of loyalty to the two levels of address. The scope of material actually covered throughout the book is limited: Brannigan sifts and resifts the main contributions of only a few key players in new historical...
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