This paper reviews presence and role of historical context in Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, two important literary theories emerged in 1980s. Cultural Materialism, propounded by Raymond Williams, and New Historicism, coined by Stephen Jay Greenblatt, are two important approaches to analysis of literature on the common ground of “context”, having socio-cultural forces behind an event, because no historical event has a single cause; rather, it is intricately connected with a web of economic, social, and political factors (Foucault). New historical critics are less fact-and event-oriented than historical critics used to be- the truth about what really happened can be purely and objectively known only from its cultural context. They are working right at the border of Marxist, poststructuralist, cultural, postcolonial, feminist, and reader-response/reader-oriented criticism. They have multiple interests and motivations. In the final part of the paper, two literary texts- William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice and Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights- are analysed from the perspectives of these two theories with cultural context of the event given in these literary texts.