Hegemony

Hegemony refers to the dominance of one group over another. In the narrow sense, this applies to a nation's political rule or domination over another. The Italian Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci, however, emphasized that hegemony is also exercised culturally: the dominant culture's ideology (values, assumptions, meanings, methods) permeates all aspects of a given culture and in fact conditions and shapes the reality for most people in that culture.

Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony (formulated, by the way, from a prison cell in fascist Italy) has been enormously influential for many critics, especially in Marxism, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

An excellent discussion of hegemony can be found in Raymond Williams' Marxism and Literature.