Gohil Khanjaniba M. is presenting on the topic of British Cultural Materialism for their MA class. Cultural materialism began in the 1950s with the work of F.R. Leavis and Matthew Arnold and examines culture through the lens of social and economic forces like class. Key thinkers in cultural materialism analyzed how the elite class maintained cultural hegemony and analyzed literature through new lenses that moved beyond aestheticism and formalism.

1.  Name: Gohil Khanjaniba M.
 Class: MA(Part-1)(Semester-2).
 Roll No: 15.
 Subject: The Cultural Studies.
 Presentation Topic: British Cultural Materialism.
 Submitted To: The Department Of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University,
Bhavnagar.

3. • What is Cultural Studies?
• British Cultural Materialism. Cultural Studies
• New Historicism.
 Cultural Materialism = Cultural Studies.
 Edward Burnet Tylor’s “Primitive Culture” (1871).
 Widest ethnographic sense- knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, etc.
acquired by man as a member of society.
 Cultural Materialism began in 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis and
heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold.

4. Raymond Williams talks about attributes of working class and
elite class.
We can see people as masses.
Modern Britain has two trajectories: As a preserver of the past.
Transformation of the status
as a norm.
Four methods of academic literary criticism: Aestheticism,
Formalism, Antihistoricism and Apoliticism.
Leavis promoted ‘The great Tradition’.

5. Theorists like Gorgy Luckas, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser,
Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio Gramsci.
Antonio insists the concept of cultural hegemony.
A sense of reality for most people …beyond which it is very
difficult for most members of society to remove.
Lukacs developed that what he called “a reflection theory” .

6. • Feminism was also important for cultural materialists.
• Dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class
struggle.
• Capitalists continues reproducing themselves without
fear of revolution.