Abstract
The new historicism and cultural materialism are here discussed in terms of their assumptions and perspective. The "new" historicists' criticism as opposed to the "old" historicists' "monological" approach rejects the notion of culture as a unity: it assumes that literary texts and other cultural productions are not organic wholes but the sites of ideological contestation. The new historicists further reject the literature (text)/history (context) binary opposition: they do not set history against literary texts as a stable and unified background but assume that literature itself is part of history, a context for other cultural and material practices. The politically engaged British cultural materialists pay considerable attention to the ideological appropriations of the Renaissance writers and texts, while the American new historicists tend to repress the political nature of their critical activity although they are much concerned with the representations of power in Renaissance literature. In spite of some methodological difficulties and problems accompanying this new approach, the new historicism is one of the most stimulative forms of modern criticism and has great potentialities.
