If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early modern England. New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture; through agile and well-informed discussions of writing by Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, and Marlowe, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender and sexuality force their way into literary texts. Sinfield is often provocative. He `rewrites' Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study always in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the United States. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures. This is a controversial, lucid, informed, and timely book by a leading exponent of cultural materialism.
