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Cultural criticism and cultural policy

The subject matter of this book was provided, in the first instance,
by a cluster of cultural theories that had derived their initial inspi-
ration from three major academic disciplines (literary criticism,
sociology and linguistics); from three intellectual traditions
(culturalism, critical theory and structuralism); and from three
national intellectual cultures (British, German and French). The
fit between discipline, tradition and national culture was by no
means exact—there were French critical theorists, German literary
humanists and British semioticians. And there was much—the
British Marxist historians, for example, or the French structural
anthropologists—that escaped these over-neat classifications. But
if the Caesarean cliché about Gaul having three parts works
anywhere, it is probably here. That said, it has all been much
complicated by the cultural politics of difference inaugurated by
the new social movements and by the postmodernisation—which
is also, in some important aspects, the Americanisation—of both
culture and cultural theory. Chapters 2 to 4 sketched out the basic
models, chapters 5 and 6 added in the complications.
An additional complication, however, was broached in
chapter 1: that of the status of cultural studies itself. Cultural
theory is still powerfully informed by the legacy of the three pred-
ecessor disciplines and it continues to be important to them. How,
after all, can you have a literary criticism or a sociology that
doesn’t have a theory of culture? But we have also traced the

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