This paper is intended as a brief critical review of three interrelated, fairly similar critical theories, born out the necessity of looking into cultural forms and products with a view to finding the politics at work therein. While American New Historicism is more historically oriented, British Cultural Materialism, with its more obvious influence from Marxism, Postcolonialism and other theories which place the margin at their centre, seems to be more in tune with contemporaneity, and so is the area of Cultural Studies, with its emphasis on cultural representations. It is advocated here that contemporary fiction cannot be fully separated from other textual forms, which are considered here historiographic (not historical) because of their nature of texts produced subjectively, within a certain political, social and cultural context, irrespective of their assumed scientific objectivity. Literature, it is further argued, has become a discourse-oriented endeavour with an active participation, an idea supported in the present study by making reference to several critical and polemic writings by Salman Rushdie, which, in a topsyturvy, postmodernist manner, are foregrounded before, and not after the literature review proper.
The New Historicism and Cultural Materialism