Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history.
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, authors of Political Shakespeare, have had considerable influence in the development of this movement and their book is considered to be a seminal text.
To do this they explore a text’s historical context and its political implications, and then through close textual analysis note the dominant hegemonic position.
Through its insistence on the importance of an engagement with issues of gender, sexuality, race and class, cultural materialism has had a significant impact on the field of literary studies, especially in Britain.
Traditional humanist readings often eschewed consideration of the oppressed and marginalized in textual readings, whereas cultural materialists routinely consider such groups in their engagement with literary texts, thus opening new avenues of approach to issues of representation in the field of literary criticism.