Robert James, Popular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain, 1930–39: A Round of Cheap Diversions? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. xii+268, ISBN 978 0 7190 8025 8 (hb), £55. Lawrence Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), pp. ix+240, 12 illus., ISBN 978 0 85989 797 6 (hb), £47.50.

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-300
Author(s):  
James Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Middlebrow Culture ◽  
British Cinema

The decline and fall of a working classicist

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Clare
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Employment Structure ◽  
Family Wealth ◽  
Academic System ◽  
Class Background ◽  
University Experience ◽  
The University

Although the academy tends not to recognize it, scholars and students from working-class backgrounds are automatically at a disadvantage. To demonstrate both sides of the university experience, I provide here a detailed, personal account of my journey from undergraduate to postgraduate to post-Ph.D. researcher. I pay special attention to my chosen subject of classics and ancient history, an area of study with its own set of class-based problems – for while those from working-class backgrounds might be (and are) subject to classism in any discipline, the seemingly inherent elitism of the classics and ancient history field makes it doubly hard for the underprivileged to succeed. I begin by illustrating how ‘working-class knowledge’ of popular culture granted me access into an otherwise closed, exclusionary set of subject materials and go from here to detail how such work is undervalued by the field, before ending on the violent effects that the all-too-familiar casualized employment structure has on those would-be academics who lack access to family wealth, savings and freedom of opportunity/action. Ultimately, I try to show how that – no matter how hard you try – if you are from working-class background, you are highly unlikely to succeed in the modern-day academic system.

Workers, Citizens and the Argentine Nation: Party Politics and the Working Class in Rosario, 1912–3

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 589-616
Author(s):  
MATTHEW B. KARUSH
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Port City ◽  
Electoral Democracy

The electoral democracy created by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 opened up dramatic new possibilities for working-class political identity. In the important port city of Rosario, the Radical politician Ricardo Caballero crafted a political discourse that combined an explicit defence of working-class interests with a nostalgic depiction of the country's rural past. By linking class consciousness with images drawn from the popular culture of the ‘gauchesque,’ Caballerismo constructed a distinctively working-class version of Argentine nationalism and citizenship.

Trading Work and Pay

1993 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 18-23
Author(s):  
Michael Rustin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Shopping Mall ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Market System ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
The Social

Gary Cross's article is a valuable and welcome attempt to extend the scope of labor history. to give attention to issues of popular culture and consumption that have been brought to current prominence especially by work in the field of cultural studies. Clearly this move reflects wider changes in society, in which the hegemony of commodity production appears to be exercised as much through the attractions of advertising and the shopping mall as through the disciplines of the factory and office. But as Cross is able to show, these are not new issues. Working-class movements have long sought to resist the power of capitalism and class domination through the social linkages of alternative class cultures as well as through bargaining and political strategies, though in the consumerist age these forms of cultural resistance are easily forgotten. Cross is right to suggest that these issues and struggles - whatever their outcomes have been – are important to labor history. His central idea of exploring the antinomies of money (conferring power within a market system) and time (allowing partial withdrawal from it) as alternative kinds of class demands, is an interesting and potentially fruitful one.

A ‘New Wave’ in British Television Drama

2005 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lez Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
American Television ◽  
The World ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Queer As Folk ◽  
The 1960S

In recent years, American television drama series have been celebrated as ‘quality television’ at the expense of their British counterparts, yet in the 1970s and 1980s British television was frequently proclaimed to be ‘the best television in the world’. This article will consider this critical turnaround and argue that, contrary to critical opinion, the last few years have seen the emergence of a ‘new wave’ in British television drama, comparable in its thematic and stylistic importance to the new wave that emerged in British cinema and television in the early 1960s. While the 1960s new wave was distinctive for its championing of a new working-class realism, the recent ‘new wave’ is more heterogeneous, encompassing drama series such as This Life, Cold Feet, The Cops, Queer as Folk, Clocking Off and Shameless. While the subject-matter of these dramas is varied, collectively they share an ambition to ‘reinvent’ British television drama for a new audience and a new cultural moment.

scholarly journals Exploiting Ambiguity: Murder! and the Meanings of Cross-Dressing in Interwar British Cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-312
Author(s):  
Chris O'Rourke
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Second World

The crime film Murder! (1930), directed by Alfred Hitchcock for British International Pictures and based on the novel Enter Sir John (1929) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, has long been cited in debates about the treatment of queer sexuality in Hitchcock's films. Central to these debates is the character of Handel Fane and the depiction of his cross-dressed appearances as a theatre and circus performer, which many critics have understood as a coded reference to homosexuality. This article explores such critical interpretations by situating Murder! more firmly in its historical context. In particular, it examines Fane's cross-dressed performances in relation to other cultural representations of men's cross-dressing in interwar Britain. These include examples from other British and American films, stories in the popular press and the publicity surrounding the aerial performer and female impersonator Barbette (Vander Clyde). The article argues that Murder! reflects and exploits a broader fascination with gender ambiguity in British popular culture, and that it anticipates the more insistent vilification of queer men in the decades after the Second World War.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document