Raymond Williams Theory of Cultural Materialism Cultural materialism is a theory which views culture as a productive process, focusing on arts such as literature. Within this culture art is transPt1
Raymond Williams Theory of Cultural Materialism Cultural materialism is a theory which views culture as a productive process, focusing on arts such as literature. Within this culture art is transPt1
Raymond Williams Theory of Cultural Materialism Pt1
Cultural materialism is a theory which views culture as a productive process, focusing on arts such as literature. Within this culture art is translated as a social use of material means of production. The concept of “literature” is seen as a social development, which according to Williams, only truly developed between the 18th and 19th century, within our culture. The critic explains in his essay Culture is Ordinary, “a culture is a whole way of life, and the arts are part of a social organisation which economic change clearly radically effects” [ii] . I hope to explore Williams’s theories regarding cultural materialism, the link that functions between capitalism and literature, and how it situates literature socially and economically. In order to support his theories, as well as my own, I am going to analyse Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights. Focusing both internally on its’ hegemonic class system and portrayal of literature within the novel, I am also going to explore the novel externally, and how the book, as well as literature as a whole, is placed within historical and modern society and its’ economy.
Wuthering heights was published in 1847, during a time of structural social change, and coincidently, four months before Marx and Engels’s book, The Communist manifesto came out. The book acted as a reaction, during a time when social fellowship had been obstructed by the industrial revolution. A new class, that existed between the aristocracy and the working class emerged; th