Welsh Marxist literary critic Williams, Raymond used this term in the 1960s to describe how his own work combined criticism of specific cultural texts with the material facts of history. In the 1980s, it was widely taken up as the name for any kind of literary or cultural research concerned with the relation between history and text. The main names we associate with this particular trend are Catherine Belsey, Jonathon Dollimore, and Alan Sinfield. Often, especially in relation to Cultural Studies, the name Cultural Materialism was invoked polemically to distinguish those forms of criticism which pertain to the ârealâ world as opposed to those which deal only with the âinsideâ of texts, never connecting them to the âoutsideâ world (such as New Criticism, Practical Criticism, and according to some lights Cultural Studies). It is often compared with New Historicism, in large part because the latterâs key figure Greenblatt, Stephen studied with Williams, but their approaches to the relationship between history and text are quite different. Cultural Materialism treats culture as a âwhole way of lifeâ (to use Williamsâs famous phrase), and not just as a series of high points along the lines of Matthew Arnold, who regarded culture as the âbestâ that has been thought and written. If culture is a whole way of life, then virtually anything can and must be treated as cultural: in this way, Williams helped to create Cultural Studies, as the field of research dedicated to interrogating all forms of cultural production. In classical Marxism, culture is merely the expression of the economic base, but Williams argued against this by problematizing the assumption that the relation between the two is direct, allowing that a work may simultaneously reflect and contest the established order determining it. Downplaying economic and technological determinism, Williams shifted the emphasis to social relations, arguing that texts can only be fully understood in relation to Gramsci, Antonioâs concept of hegemony. In other words, the essential question for cultural material with respect to any text is: does it challenge, alter, reject, or endorse the prevailing ideology? Further Reading: J. Brannigan New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998). C. Colebrook New Literary Histories (1997). A. Milner Cultural Materialism (1989). S. Wilson Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice (1995).