ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the later and more specific critical discourse and its developments in countries beyond the British Isles. Cultural studies were decisively oriented toward the analysis and critique of concrete cultural productions and institutions and their political ramifications. Cultural studies originated in large part as a critical response to the fact that many of the most important and complex issues in contemporary popular culture tended to fall through the cracks dividing the existing academic disciplines and, to some degree, the available critical discourses. In its origins, British cultural studies can be viewed as a response to the dramatic changes in the economic, political, and cultural life of Great Britain in the postwar period, especially as reflected in the changing role of British educational institutions. One of the earliest attempts to theorize the area of popular culture and establish it as a legitimate and important area of critical inquiry was The Popular Arts by Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel.
