Literature, Culture and Society
University College London Press, London ix + 232 pp, 1996
US
edition: New York University Press, New York
Australian
edition: Allen and Unwin, Sydney
Literature, Culture and Society reinstates the centrality of literature to cultural studies. As cultural studies has grown from its modest origins on the margins of English Literature into the academic boom industry it is today, it has tended to discard both literature and sociology in favour of an increasing emphasis on the semiotics of popular culture. This book makes a determined attempt to re-establish the connections between literary studies, cultural studies and sociology.
Arguing, by turn, against literary humanism on the one hand, and sociological relativism on the other, this book is both an introduction to and an intervention in the major contemporary debates concerning the literary canon and its non-literary 'others'. The book provides an accessible overview of the major theoretical approaches to textual analysis, from hermeneutics to postmodernism, and presents a substantive account of the capitalist literary mode of production, focussing both on the technologies of mechanical reproduction, and on the social relations of commodification. The book also provides a number of useful illustrative case-studies of written texts and films.
Literature, Culture and Society is a challenging and provocative introduction to the sociology of literature and will be essential reading for students and teachers of literary and cultural studies.
'the book is dedicated to showing how one might proceed to read productively the production of literature and culture, high and low, together and alongside one another without ever conflating or reducing one type of cultural reflexivity to another ... Milner ... extends to a new era Williams's theoretical concerns ... Literature, Culture and Society ... remind[s] us yet again of the ongoing use value of Marxist vocabulary and arguments after the death of Marxism as political project ... Like his confrere in arms, Terry Eagleton, Milner refuses to accept the commonplace wisdom that Marxism is also dead as an intellectual project ...' - Trevor Hogan, La Trobe University,Thesis Eleven