Blackwell Reference Online

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In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson describes Marxism as the only system that can offer ‘an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past’ because it assimilates the history of human society to ‘the unity of a single great collective story’ - the history of class struggle (1981: 19–20). The criticism produced by the current poststructuralist, neo-Marxist and new historicist orientations of early modern studies, however, considers class not as the ultimate subject of history but as a key element in the critique of ideology, which reveals how literature (as institution and genre) serves the interests of a dominant culture, social group or gender. Such criticism typically claims to uncover meanings that lie hidden beneath the surface, and the validity of its interpretive procedures does not depend on whether authors and audiences in a given period are conscious of the workings of ideology. Thus the editors of The New Eighteenth Century, the collection of essays which most clearly signals the turn towards theory in eighteenth-century studies, include ‘the formation of a broad and systematic critique of ideology, and … a new interdisciplinarity concurrent with and attendant upon such a critique’ among ‘the most productive new directions’ for the field (Brown and Nussbaum 1987: 20). This programme has in turn been criticized for privileging ‘abstractions’ like ... log in or subscribe to read full text