• 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

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