This chapter focuses on cultural history, as an exploration of beliefs and values, rather than what might be better described as the history of culture. It explores the works of Marxist historians associated with the Communist Party Historians' Group and considers the earlier approaches to cultural history, as influences on the Group, and the development of newer theoretical positions that developed both out of and in opposition to Marxism. In Anderson's view, culture clearly flowed from the structure of society, not from the collective actions of social groups. Furthermore, he discounted the notion of a tradition of English radicalism. The collapse of communism called into question the Marxian idea of history having meaning, purpose and direction. The chapter identifies a growing emphasis on a 'cultural' approach to history that has developed through a number of theoretical positions: from a 'culturalist' critique of capitalism to poststructuralism via Marxism.

In 2005, the Historical Association published a government-sponsored report, which attacked what it referred to as the 'Hitlerisation' of history. The report's positive reference to what The Spectator called 'Our shameful Nazi fetish', helped to conjure a picture of the mindless anti-German 'patriotism' that characterises elements of British society. This chapter takes a look at the unique fascination that the Nazis has exercised on both academic and popular historiography, along with the allied study of the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning rejects the 'intentionalist' view that the Holocaust was the fulfilment of a long-term plan formulated by Adolf Hitler in the 1920s, but he has argued that Hitler played a much more direct role in the process leading to the Holocaust. The chapter demonstrates that historiographical issues are intimately connected with political and social developments in the Nazi regime.

The term 'history' is often used to mean the past. It also means that which is written about the past, historiography or a description of the past. Another popular term 'historic', designating something that is worthy of record, suggests not only that some events or actions are more important than others, but that a principle of selection has to be applied. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott thought that historians had legitimately created a form of historical experience that dealt with 'a dead past' which was 'unlike the present' and was 'the past for its own sake' without practical application. History in the historiographical sense is made by us, not by people in the past nor by the record of their actions. Contrary to another popular usage, history does not speak to us directly, even if the source is oral testimony. This chapter also presents an overview of in this book.

Gender history presents gender identities, of both men and women, as cultural and social constructs, as, in other words, bundles of meanings usually embodied in language. The reference to semiotics is indicative of the influence of postmodernism on gender historians. This chapter notes that gender historians share the broadly oppositional stance of Women's History. Denise Riley argues that her interest in the gender construction of women flows from her belief that language is the location of women's oppression. The chapter cites some gender historians who viewed gender identities as expressions of social change within a wider society, that, to put it another way, such changes were the product of processes within a wider, external world. It also argues that women will logically continue to grapple with the past and out of that situation will come conflicting interpretations.

There were differences of emphasis between lesbian and gay theory, and two major strands of thinking within lesbian theory itself. The first of these is lesbian feminism, which is understood by seeing it initially in the context of its own origins from within feminism. The second is designated as libertarian lesbianism seen as part of the field of 'queer theory' or 'queer studies'. This chapter discusses the nature and development of the thinking designated as lesbian feminism and libertarian lesbianism. It describes the critical activities of queer theorists and presents an example of this kind of criticism taken from the chapter 'The love poetry of the First World War' in Mark Lilly's Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century. A STOP and THINK section provides the reader with some ‘hands-on’ experience with the subject discussed.

Though structuralism began in the 1950s and 1960s, it has its roots in the thinking of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure was a key figure in the development of modern approaches to language study. He emphasised that the meanings given to words are purely arbitrary, and that these meanings are maintained by convention only. This chapter examines Saussure's pronouncements about linguistic structures which the structuralists later found so interesting. The other major figure in the early phase of structuralism was Roland Barthes, who applied the structuralist method to the general field of modern culture. The chapter lists the activities of structuralist critics and provides examples on the methods of literary analysis described and demonstrated in Barthes's book S/Z. STOP and THINK sections in the chapter provide the reader with some ‘hands-on’ experience with the subject discussed.

The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the 'women's movement' of the 1960s. In feminist criticism in the 1970s the major effort went into exposing what might be called the mechanisms of patriarchy, that is, the cultural 'mind-set' in men and women which perpetuated sexual inequality. This chapter looks at three particular areas on which debates and disagreements have centred on about feminist criticism: the role of theory; the nature of language; and the value or otherwise of psychoanalysis. It includes a STOP and THINK section to help readers ponder over anti-essentialism which has for some years now been a dominant concept in critical theory. The chapter describes some critical activities of feminist critics and presents an example of feminist criticism by taking the account of Wuthering Heights by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from their book The Madwoman in the Attic.

This culminating chapter shifts the focus to Shakespeare’s late plays, notably the generically pivotal Pericles (almost certainly a collaboration with George Wilkins) and that supreme instance of Shakespearean tragicomic romance, The Winter’s Tale. The now-dominant critical view of Italian influence is qualified with reference to the diverse kinds and origins of tragicomedy in English, including those with French analogues and those mediated by French sources, notably French versions of the antique novel. The redaction of the Apollonius of Tyre story incorporated by François de Belleforest in his Histoires tragiques receives close attention as an intertext for both Pericles and The Winter’s Tale. Its importance extends to recuperating from the antique romance tradition a notion of tragicomedy as being, in effect, tragédie à fin heureuse. Shakespeare’s use of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais in the translation of John Florio is also reviewed from this perspective – not merely the well-known passage from ‘Of the Caniballes’ adapted in The Tempest, but several textual traces from other essays, previously unnoticed, that arguably shed light on the movement in Shakespeare’s final plays (including Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration with John Fletcher) towards a generic synthesis mirroring an all-inclusive vision of human experience.