In their Foreword to Political Shakespeare footnote1 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield give a brief account of ‘cultural materialism’: a mode of critical analysis which examines both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ texts, insists on their implication in history, denies that they have any transcendent meanings, and takes its stand on openly avowed political commitments. Sinfield’s recent study, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain,footnote2 applies this approach to a range of themes and writings, often foregrounding the work of well-known literary authors (Angus Wilson and Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, among many others), but attending also to less established figures and to discourses and cultural practices beyond the purview of ‘literary criticism’ as it used to be conceived. Thus, for instance, the ideologies of child care (Bowlby, Winnicott) and the norms of The New Yorker short story (‘I would really like to get something in The New Yorker’: Plath in 1956) are presented as important contexts for Plath’s stories and poems, and work by Larkin, Thom Gunn and Kingsley Amis is situated within a broad account of the impact of jazz and popular music on literary intellectuals.

The book’s chapters are focused neither on writers or groups of writers, nor on discrete chronological periods, but on a series of cultural shifts, movements and problems: the genealogy of the New Left and of ‘left culturism’, the reinvention of modernism in the usa, the construction of a male homosexual identity perceived as linked with an ‘effete’ cultural establishment, and so on. Sinfield’s overall thesis is that within the postwar social-democratic settlement (‘welfare capitalism’), a notion of ‘good culture’ was fostered. This, like other good things, was no longer to be the exclusive preserve of the middle and upper classes. Under the tutelage of liberal governors, the population at large was to have an opportunity to enjoy it. As the social and economic aspects of the project have proved unattainable, and as their desirability has been challenged by the New Right, so—argues Sinfield—the concomitant cultural enterprise has come to seem unworkable too. The displacement of ‘welfare capitalism’ by Thatcherism is regretted (even if the original postwar settlement was never more than a compromise), but the collapse of universalist cultural assumptions is welcomed, although it has involved the downfall of left-liberal aspirations. ‘“Man” is a powerful concept,’ Sinfield writes in a key passage, ‘but I cannot regret its loss to the left. A divided society should have a divided culture: an (apparently) unified culture can only reinforce power relations. In many circumstances it may be necessary. . .to defend the arts. . .against new-right assault. But the idea of a universal “good” culture is mystifying and oppressive, and a medium-term project should be to validate instead a range of subcultures.’ (p. 300). This defines the book’s perspective: the denial (contra Raymond Williams, who is nonetheless acknowledged as a major influence) that bourgeois high culture has any power to transcend the class circumstances of its making, and the selection of themes and texts within which ‘culture’ and ‘subculture’ are shown to interact. The argument is carried forward much more in detailed exemplification than in general statement of the kind just quoted, and one is persuaded or not on a case-by-case basis. One notes, however, some questions about this programmatic claim. Who, we may ask, is to ‘validate’ the subcultures: the institution of academic criticism, whose title to do so will hardly survive the process of cultural fission Sinfield describes and applauds?