Subversion and containment

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Subversion and containment is a concept in literary studies introduced by Stephen Greenblatt in his 1988 essay "Invisible Bullets".^[1] It has subsequently become a much-used concept in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to textual analysis. Literary critic Louis A. Montrose writes that the terms are often used to refer to the "capacity of the dominant order to generate subversion so as to use it to its own ends".^[2]