This lucid and concise overview brings a much-needed sense of historical and theoretical scale to the growth of cultural studies. The authors identify six major paradigms in cultural theory: utilitarianism; culturalism and cultural materialism; critical theory and the sociology of culture; structuralist and post-structuralist semiology; difference theory; and postmodernism. They outline the social and discursive contexts within which each of these has developed, and provide the essential grounding to understand current debates in the field.
This third edition of Contemporary Cultural Theory has been extensively revised to include new material on the new historicism, Zizek, Bourdieu, Deleuze and Guattari, queer theory, black and Latino cultural studies, cultural policy and posthumanism.
A rigorous and accessible guide to the often tricky manoeuvres of literary, social and cultural theorists in recent years, Contemporary Cultural Theory is an invaluable resource for all students of the many disciplines now informed by cultural theory.
“an accurate, intelligent, and often elegant guide to theory…combines essential information with a stimulating and important critique…Highly recommended”
–Choice
“a careful and usable guide…clear and well-documented”
–Times Literary Supplement
Contents
Cultural studies and cultural theory
Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism
Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture
Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism
The cultural politics of difference
Postmodernism and cultural theory
Cultural criticism and cultural policy
About the Author / Editor
Andrew Milner is Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University. He is author of Cultural Materialism (1993), Literature, Culture and Society (1996), Class (1999) and Re-Imagining Cultural Studies (2002).
Jeff Browitt teaches in Spanish, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University. He has published on French sociocriticism and Latin American literature.
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