682 _____________________________________________________________ DOI: https://doi.org/10.33258/birci.v3i2.879 Cultural Materialism in Lorca’s Poetry Mahnaz Soqandi, Fatemeh Sadat Basirizadeh 1 Student in English Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran Department of English Language and Literature, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran mahnaz.sogandi24@gmail.com I. Introduction Cultural materialism, like new historicism, privileges power relations as the most important context for interpreting texts, but where new historicists deal with the power relations of past societies, cultural materialists explore literary texts within the context of contemporary power relations (Brannigan, 9). According to cultural materialists, texts always have a material function within contemporary power structures. This is amply demonstrated by Alan Sinfield in Faultiness. Cultural materialism, like new historicism, studies the means and methods by which the existing order perpetuates or attempts to transform itself, and proffers a dismal view of the possibility of effective resistance against the dominant order. But whereas for new historicism subversion is always contained by state power, cultural materialism is slightly more hopeful and for a critic like Sinfield there are sufficient cracks and contradictions in the system to allow for some oppositional intervention. It is possible, according to cultural materialist critics, to expose these contradictions to a degree sufficient to facilitate evasions of the ‘structure of containment’(Brannigan, 10). The very evident difference between cultural materialism and new historicism is that the latter excludes the possibility of effective dissidence, whereas cultural materialism attempts to define how dissidence is articulated (Brannigan, 69). Abstract The aim of the present research is to investigate Lorca’s poem from cultural materialist point of view. To do so, the researcher investigates how culture and social mechanism function in the context in which the poems have been written. Cultural materialism attempts to investigate different aspects of society, art, economy, language, and politics from an external point of view and analyze them to find out how identity and self are shaped accordingly. Cultural materialism is demonstrated in different categories including gender, ethnic studies, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and other fields. Cultural materialism highlights the relation between a work of art and the ideological system in which it has been created. In other words, cultural, social, religious and several other factors must be accounted for while interpreting a work of art. Consequently, how cultural dogma functions within fine arts in order to produce the internal textures is uncovered through cultural materialism. In Lorca’s poems, the contents have symbolic and metaphoric mechanisms which can be interpreted through material analysis. Keywords Culture; dominant; emergent; residual; ideology