ABSTRACT
The study of national cultures, national languages and national literatures all developed with the rise of the nation state inaugurated in 1776 and 1789. Literary study proceeded in the belief that literature came down from heaven, touched its reader with greatness, and then immediately went back to heaven again. The academic study of great literature only became properly instituted in the West in the 1930s. Certain historical factors shape the development of British Cultural Studies. It grows from within the English tradition which inherits a concern with the moral state of culture, a tradition exemplified in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and, in the twentieth century, ER. Leavis. In 1964 Richard Hoggart helped to found the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, with himself as Director, a position later taken over by Stuart Hall. The Structuralist moment in British Cultural Studies arises through a critique of the previous Culturalism.
