Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope

Richard Hoggart is regarded as one of the ‘inventors’ of Cultural Studies. His work traversed academic and social boundaries. With the resurgent interest in his work today, this is a timely reevaluation of this foundational figure in Cultural Studies, a critical but friendly review of both Hoggart′s work and reputation. The authors use new archival sources to reevaluate Hoggart′s intellectual and ethical influence, arguing that most attacks on his positions have been misplaced and even malevolent, and urging his importance for today’s world. Chapters address Hoggart’s contradictory and restless relationship with academic history; his uneasy but fruitful relationship with the idea of the ‘working–class intellectual’; his engagement with policy related work inside and outside the academy; his adaptation of methods of literary analysis and the political implications of his own style; and the politics of autobiography.

Foreword viii Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 1 Literature, Language, and Politics 16 The Uses of Literature 18 Hoggart in Context: Post–war Britain and the Leavises 21 The Language of ‘Theory’ 30 The Common Reader 34 Democratic Criticism 38 2 The Politics of Autobiography 49 Cultural Studies and Autobiography 51 Generic Conventions 54 Representing Working–Class Lives 59 Situating the Critic 66 3 Working–Class Intellectuals and Democratic Scholarship 73 Scholarship Boy 74 University Adult Education and the Varieties of Learning 76 The Grammar School and Working–Class Education 79 ′Working–Class Intellectuals′ and the ′Great Tradition′ 85 4 Cultural Studies and the Uses of History 94 History and Cultural Studies 94 Locating Richard Hoggart 96 Richard Hoggart and the Emergence of Social History 102 Historians and Richard Hoggart 119 ′Nostalgia′, ′Romanticism′, and ′Sentimentality′: Recuperating Hoggart 122 5 Media, Culture, and Society 134 The BBC and Society 135 The Emergence of Commercial Broadcasting and Pilkington 138 Diversity, Authority, and Quality 145 The Limits and Possibilities of Broadcasting in the Twenty–First Century 154 6 Policy, Pedagogy, and Intellectuals 181 An International Servant 183 The Idea of University Adult Education 189 The Role of the Intellectual 194 Index 209

Michael Bailey is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of  Essex, UK. He is the editor of Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio–Cultural Change in the Twenty–First Century (with Guy Redden, 2011), Richard Hoggart: Culture & Critique (with Mary Eagleton, 2011), and Narrating Media History (2008). Ben Clarke is Assistant Professor of Twentieth–century British Literature, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), USA. His Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values , appeared in 2007. His research interests include working–class culture, the public house, and Englishness. John K. Walton is IKERBASQUE Research Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country, Spain. He edits the Journal of Tourism History , and his most recent book, with Keith Hanley, is Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the Tourist Gaze (2010).