While there is widespread agreement that cultural literary studies is an important field of study, scholars disagree about how to successfully go about defining cultural criticism. In Approaching Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl explain that cultural criticism "focuses on what a work conveys about social attitudes and social relations, focusing on the impact of such things as social background, sex, class, ethnicity, power, and privilege" (1465). They go on to explain that it is important not only to analyze the ways in which these things affect the work, but the way the work "can influence, and perhaps change, the economic conditions, political situation, or social conventions" of its time or even of later times (1465).
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