Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope

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.