ABSTRACT
Since the late 1950s there has existed within English-speaking intellectual and cultural life a project which has made a significant impact on academic work within the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. In the 1950s, this project did not have a name. It did not even have a single source. It arose within a particular social and historical context from the work of three individuals with similar but by no means identical concerns. The three individuals (Raymond Williams [Williams 1963], Richard Hoggart [Hoggart 1969], and E.P.Thompson [Thompson 1968]) were concerned in different ways with the question of culture in the class-stratified society of England. In their own way, each author was attempting to understand the role and effect of culture at a critical point in England’s own history: a point marked by the end of the Second World War, the inheritance of a class politics of limited endurance in a changed and changing social environment, and the importation or invasion of mass-mediated forms of American culture that made public and highlighted for all the class-ridden character of English cultural life.
