The Uses of Literacy

This pioneering work examines how mass media changed the lives and values of the English working class. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, Hoggart's approaches to cultural analysis do not hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique.
In the introduction to the 1992 edition of The Uses of Literacy, Andrew Goodwin defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. The new postscript by John Corner begins with a discussion of Hoggart's contribution to the British cultural debate and concludes with an interview in which Hoggart comments on the origins of The Uses of Literacy, the founding of the Birmingham Centre, the relationship between the broadcasting debates of the early 1960s and those of today, and on other questions of cultural change and cultural analysis. This volume will be both beneficial to as well as enjoyed by cultural historians, communications specialists, media scholars, and sociologists. More

Richard Hoggart was professor of modern English literature at Birmingham University.