Contexts

Abstract

A book like this would have been inconceivable 40 years ago. Richard Hoggart had influenced us all with Uses of Literacy (1957), and Raymond Williams, lonely among the Leavisites, was in Cambridge arguing that there was more to culture than English Literature, which itself had been an upstart academic discipline a couple of generations before. But there was no hint of the imminent explosion of media and cultural studies, accelerating and gathering momentum as it went, hungrily gobbling up related disciplines. Now media studies is as attractive to students and as derided by the cultural establishment as Sociology was in the 1960s; and we know what happened to Sociology. Coming from a generation which was not allowed to study someone’s work unless they had been dead for a decent interval, and who then told stories on a screen for decades before this academic interest began, I observe it all with astonishment.