Archived news

16 January 2012: Two new books published by Dr Michael Bailey

Two new books by Dr Michael Bailey have been published about Richard Hoggart, one of the 'inventors' of Cultural studies.

Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (with Ben Clarke and John K. Walton) (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Richard Hoggart is regarded as one of the ‘inventors’ of Cultural Studies. His work traversed academic and social boundaries. With the resurgent interest in his work today, this is a timely reevaluation of this foundational figure in Cultural Studies, a critical but friendly review of both Hoggart′s work and reputation. The authors use new archival sources to reevaluate Hoggart′s intellectual and ethical influence, arguing that most attacks on his positions have been misplaced and even malevolent, and urging his importance for today’s world. Chapters address Hoggart’s contradictory and restless relationship with academic history; his uneasy but fruitful relationship with the idea of the ‘working–class intellectual’; his engagement with policy related work inside and outside the academy; his adaptation of methods of literary analysis and the political implications of his own style; and the politics of autobiography.

Reviews include:

• 'I am glad to be able to write a foreword to this illuminating book. Its authors rightly insist on the continuing relevance of Richard’s work, which has covered aspects of life that have always interested me... I think that Richard would approve of its subtitle A Pedagogy of Hope, for there can be no acceptable future without hope. This is a book which avoids nostalgia and which will appeal, I am sure, not only to his few surviving contemporaries but to a readership of people of all ages situated, if not always firmly, in their own times'. Asa Briggs, Baron Briggs, of Lewes in the County of East Sussex
• ‘This is an engaging, informative and combative work. It is exactly what it says, a “critical introduction” that moves way beyond plain description of Hoggart’s life and works, showing the relevance (but also, sometimes, the limitations) of his work and constantly contextualizing it within debates in both cultural studies and the wider political field. It is extremely well rooted in the various relevant literatures but also adds much knowledge from new sources, particularly those contained in the Hoggart Archive. In every sense, it is a good advert for, and defence of, studying the humanities.’ Dave Russell, Leeds Metropolitan University
• “A fascinating and insightful analysis of a leading public intellectual, obsessive auto–biographer, founder of a new academic discipline and original cultural critic.” James Curran, Goldsmiths, University of London
• “The authors of Understanding Richard Hoggart highlight, with rigor and respect, the continuing relevance of Hoggart′s work to anyone with an interest in how the cultural landscape at once shapes, and is shaped by, our individual habits." Lynsey Hanley, journalist and author of ′Estates: an Intimate History′

Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique (with Mary Eagleton) (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2012)

Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique provides a detailed and critical analysis of Hoggart's life and work. Some of the contributions come from a personal knowledge of and collegial friendship with Hoggart and help us to know more about particular aspects of his biography. Other contributors have sought to fit Hoggart within a British tradition from Matthew Arnold, through F.R. Leavis to E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. Read in their entirety, this lively collection of essays raise fundamental questions about culture and the arts, moral and aesthetic sensibility, educated citizenship and social democracy, and will be of interest to students and academics in social history, literary criticism, and cultural sociology.

Reviews include:

• ‘This is a thought-provoking, inquiring collection of new essays, which opens up a rich matrix of themes, many not hitherto explored. It is another welcome sign of a long-overdue revival of interest and scholarship in Richard Hoggart’s work’. Stuart Hall, Open University
• ‘This is a quite magnificent collection. Perhaps for the first time, Richard Hoggart's astonishing career and achievement is given its full credit and significance - significance not only of an intellectual kind but as a whole lifetime of practical moral effort and consequence. The book therefore implies a new, timely and rousing evaluation of a man whose exemplary life, still vividly present to our society, can show us how to cherish and renew the best parts of our culture and, just as powerfully, how to name and reject what is worst. Each of these admirably edited essays takes with absolute seriousness the great life-questions which it was Hoggart's mighty purpose to pose and face: what is our civilization worth? what is the duty of each individual towards it? what is the nature of a citizen's responsibility for the way we live now?’ Fred Inglis, University of Sheffield