Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”: A Cultural Materialist Reading

Abstract

Despite the fact that almost all critics agree that Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” is greatly important, many of them have found the poem difficult or enigmatic. Arnold’s “Dover Beach” encompasses many of the essential aspects of the Victorian age. This is why this article has adopted the cultural materialist approach to analyse this poem. Cultural Materialism takes to its focal concern the social, the political, the economic and the religious dimensions of the poem side by side with the literary aspects of the text. Cultural Materialism, thus, avails itself of the contextual discourse that helps with analysing the text; it also looks at the text as important in revealing many of the contextual aspects in which the text was written and published. Through this approach, the cultural (social, religious, political and economic) aspects of the poem are investigated side by side with the literary analysis of the text...