Tony Bennett

This important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK, and Australia in the late 19th century.

Culture, Class, Distinction is a major contribution to international debates regarding the role of cultural capital in relation to modern forms of inequality. Drawing on a national study of the organisation of cultural practices in contemporary Britain, the authors review Bourdieu’s classic study of the relationships between culture and class in the light of subsequent debates. In doing so they re-appraise the relationships between class, gender and ethnicity, music, film, television, literary, and arts consumption, the organisation of sporting and culinary practices, and practices of bodily and self maintenance. As the most comprehensive account to date of the varied interpretations of cultural capital that have been developed in the wake of Bourdieu’s work, Culture, Class, Distinction offers the first systematic assessment of the relationships between cultural practice and the social divisions of class, gender and ethnicity in contemporary Britain. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationships between culture and society. —Publisher

Culture is a defining aspect of what it means to be human. Defining culture and pinpointing its role in our lives is not, however, so straightforward. Terry Eagleton, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics, is uniquely poised to take on the challenge. In this keenly analytical and acerbically funny book, he explores how culture and our conceptualisations of it have evolved over the last two centuries--from rarified sphere to humble practices, and from a bulwark against industrialism's encroaches to present-day capitalism's most profitable export. Ranging over art and literature as well as philosophy and anthropology, and major but somewhat 'unfashionable' thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder and Edmund Burke aw well as T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Raymond Williams and Oscar Wilde, Eagleton provides a cogent overview of culture set firmly in its historical and theoretical contexts, illuminating its collusion with colonialism, nationalism, the decline of religion, and the rise of and rule of the 'uncultured' masses. Eagleton also examines culture today, lambasting the commodification and co-option of a force that, properly understood, is a vital means for us to cultivate and enrich our social lives, and can even provide the impetus to transform civil society. -- Inside jacket flap.

"What does culture mean to us today? In New Keywords, three luminaries in the field of cultural studies have assembled a volume showcasing 142 signed entries that capture the practices, institutions, and debates of contemporary society. Almost thirty years ago Raymond Williams's Keywords set the standard for how we understand and use the language of culture and society. New Keywords reflects the transformation in culture and society since 1976 and is a state-of-the-art reference for students, teachers, and culture vultures everywhere."--Jacket.

With the 'cultural turn', the concept of culture has assumed enormous importance in our understanding of the interrelations between social, political, and economic structures, patterns of everyday interaction, and systems of meaning-making. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, the leading figures in their fields explore the implications of this paradigm shift. Part I looks at the major disciplines of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, asking how they have been reshaped by the cultural turn and how they have elaborated distinctive new objects of knowledge. Parts II and III examine the questions arising from a practice of analysis in which the researcher is drawn reflexively into the object of study and in which methodological frameworks are rarely given in advance.