The Uses Of Literacy: Aspects Of Working-Class Life With Special Reference To Publications And Entertainments
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
First published in 1957, The Uses of Literacy stands as one of the most groundbreaking works of cultural criticism in postwar Britain, a passionate and meticulously observed portrait of working-class life that forever changed how scholars and readers think about culture, class, and mass media. Richard Hoggart chronicles the rich, self-contained world of the English working class — its rituals, values, and communal bonds — drawing on his own upbringing in the back-to-back streets of Leeds to ground his argument in lived, intimate detail. With penetrating clarity, he argues that the rise of mass-market publications and commercial entertainments posed a profound threat to the authentic folk culture of working people, substituting shallow sensation for genuine feeling and eroding the moral fabric of community life. A foundational text in the field of cultural studies, The Uses of Literacy helped establish the discipline that would flourish at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Hoggart himself founded at the University of Birmingham. His prose moves with rare authority between the lyrical and the analytical, weaving sociological argument with the warmth of memoir, creating a work that is simultaneously a scholarly intervention and a deeply personal elegy. For anyone seeking to understand how ordinary life is shaped by the forces of commerce and communication, this landmark study raises questions that remain urgently, uncomfortably unresolved.
Author: Richard Hoggart
Format: Hardback
Published: 1957, Chatto & Windus
Genre: Society & culture
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
First published in 1957, The Uses of Literacy stands as one of the most groundbreaking works of cultural criticism in postwar Britain, a passionate and meticulously observed portrait of working-class life that forever changed how scholars and readers think about culture, class, and mass media. Richard Hoggart chronicles the rich, self-contained world of the English working class — its rituals, values, and communal bonds — drawing on his own upbringing in the back-to-back streets of Leeds to ground his argument in lived, intimate detail. With penetrating clarity, he argues that the rise of mass-market publications and commercial entertainments posed a profound threat to the authentic folk culture of working people, substituting shallow sensation for genuine feeling and eroding the moral fabric of community life. A foundational text in the field of cultural studies, The Uses of Literacy helped establish the discipline that would flourish at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Hoggart himself founded at the University of Birmingham. His prose moves with rare authority between the lyrical and the analytical, weaving sociological argument with the warmth of memoir, creating a work that is simultaneously a scholarly intervention and a deeply personal elegy. For anyone seeking to understand how ordinary life is shaped by the forces of commerce and communication, this landmark study raises questions that remain urgently, uncomfortably unresolved.