ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the work produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel. This body of work, despite certain differences between its authors, constitutes the founding texts of culturalism. The chapter deals with a brief discussion of the institutionalization of culturalism into cultural studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In a contemporary review of The Uses of Literacy, Williams refers to the extremely damaging and quite untrue identification of 'popular culture' with 'working-class culture'. There is a clear distinction between mass culture produced for the working class and working-class culture produced by the working class from the texts and practices of mass culture. The aim of The Popular Arts is to replace the ‘misleading generalizations’ of earlier attacks on popular culture by helping to facilitate popular discrimination within and across the range of popular culture itself.
