ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The key difference between new historicism and cultural materialism is that New Historicism focuses on the oppression in the society that has to be overcome in order to achieve change whereas cultural Materialism focuses on how that change is brought about.

Detailed explanation-2: -Like the New Historicists, Cultural Materialists also believe in the textuality of history and the historicity of texts; they are aware of the political agendas of the text and hence are alert to the ways in which power exerts itself through implicit workings of ideology within the text.

Detailed explanation-3: -Moving away from text-centered schools of criticism such as New Criticism, New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a particular cultural moment.

Detailed explanation-4: -Like new historicism, cultural materialism privileges power relations as the most important context for interpreting texts, but where new historicists deal with the power relations of past societies, cultural materialists explore literary texts within the context of contemporary power relations.