This timely volume provides both a model and an agenda for a contemporary materialist criticism. Written by leading critics and theorists, the eight essays brought together here (four of which are previously unpublished) represent widely diverse materialist approaches. In his introduction, David Simpson considers the potential of materialist criticism for shedding light on a number of important concerns-including class, gender, ideology, and discourse. Taken together, the essays, by incorporating the perspectives of gender studies and postmodernism, challenge and redefine classic Marxist priorities and enlarge the possibilities of cultural materialism. Subject to History should help to raise the level of debate among literary theorists, feminist and Marxist critics, and literary historians.