Understanding Richard Hoggart

Awarded 2013 PROSE Honorable Mention in Media & Cultural Studies 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. Re-examines the reputation of one of the ‘inventors’ of Cultural Studies Uses new archival sources to critically evaluate Hoggart's contribution and influence, set his work in context, and determine its current relevance Addresses detractors and their positions of Hoggart, delineating long-term ideological battles within academia Brings cultural studies, literary criticism, and social history to bear on this figure whose interests spread across disciplines, to create a text which blends many threads into a coherent whole

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