Introduction

Abstract

The Language, Discourse, Society series (LDS) was launched some 25 years ago, in 1978, with the publication of Colin MacCabe’s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word an exploration of the terms of a political understanding of literary writing. It was followed a year later by Paul Hirst’s On Law and Ideology a slim volume that provided a rigorous critical account of the new theory of ideology being developed by Louis Althusser and those around him, before proceeding to consideration of the shortcomings of the conventional Marxist analysis of the law of property. The initiators and editors of the series were Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, with Denise Riley joining them as an editor in 1984. All three had been students at Cambridge in the late 1960s and there was a certain appropriateness in the fact that the first of the series books was to be a catalyst soon after its publication for the ‘MacCabe affair’, an initially local matter of refusal of academic promotion which, in the ideological climate of the early Thatcher years and fuelled by the media, spilled over from parochial Cambridge to become a national concern. ‘Traditionalists’were pitted against ‘marxists’ or ‘structuralists’in a controversy as to the nature of English and English studies, the conditions of academic discipline and standards, the establishment of values, and the place and implications of new theoretical approaches — issues that were indeed central to LDS.