Description
Book SynopsisPresents a comprehensive social history of the cultural studies movement. Tracing British literary criticism from the French Revolution through the 1960s, this book describes how cultural studies in its infancy recombined the elite literary critical tradition with the First New Left's concerns for history and popular culture.
Trade Review“Richard E. Lee’s tome is an ambitious grand narrative which places the emergence and expansion of cultural studies within the vast, world-historical context of crisis and transformation of the intellectual structures through which we know and live in the world today. A compelling read.”—Ien Ang, author of
On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West"Richard E. Lee’s book is a stunning achievement. It marks the conjuncture of cultural studies and world-systems analysis. Lee accounts for the rise of cultural studies in England in terms of the transformations in the political economy of the world-system. His work is a structural analysis of the discourse of discourse."—Immanuel Wallerstein, author of
The End of the World as We Know ItTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part One: From Category to Institution
1. The Politics of Culture I: Limits of Possibilities, 1945–1968 11
2. The Politics of Culture II: Tensions of Continuity, 1790–1968 35
Part Two: From Alliance to Bandwagon
3. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies I 73
4. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies II 108
5. A Rose by Any Other Name? The Wide World and Many Modes of Cultural Studies 140
Part Three: From Resistance to Transition
6. Conjunctural Knowledge I: Structures of Order, 1945–1968 173
7. Conjunctural Knowledge II: Patters of Disarray, 1968 and After 192
8. The Near Future of the Long Term: A Bricoleur's World 206
Notes 215
Works Cited 237
Index 267
