Page 253 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

242 ENGLISH STUDIES

the ways in which kinds of writing were at once constituted through different
kinds of schooling, through publishing and in relation to particular ideologies
such as the political ideology of ‘citizenship’, and articulated against each other.
A cluster of women writers were taken as a detailed case for these concerns and
began (in discussion of Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm) to open up questions to
do with gendered reading.
‘Work in progress 2’ (pages 256–68 below) draws on work in 1978–9
concerned with the relations between popular fiction and popular culture, in
which the issue of common sense became important. Bromley’s characterization
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of masculine and feminine romance was extremely suggestive, and we turned
to women’s romance, especially Cartland, for a detailed case.
Feminism has been central to the work throughout, and while we began by
looking at English in education (under the shadow of Balibar and Althusser) for
its institutional role in constructing readerships, the work on popular fiction has
begun to take up the ‘extra-curricular’, to look at new kinds of ‘educative’ fiction
emerging oppositionally in the construction of an adequately ‘popular culture’.

Work in progress 1

Women, feminism and literature in the 1930s
The juxtaposition of literature and history, of text and society, in order to ground
a historical analysis of literature has been a central achievement of Marxist work.
It broke with traditional literary history’s uninterrupted ideal ordering of great
books across the ages, though not far enough to question the inevitable
‘greatness’ of these works. Much Marxist literary analysis has attempted to
theorize more clearly the relationship between literature and history. The
signposts in the debates —causal determination, reflection, homology,
correspondence, over-determination, mediation, relative autonomy, reproduction
—can be seen as permutations derived from the central juxtaposition. However,
the terms of debate which these various concepts represent continually make it
difficult to consider two very important issues—the relation of gender to writing
and the relation of literature to other nonliterary fictions. Our aim has been to
produce an account in which the specific and different histories of various kinds
of fictions are acknowledged and which enables an analysis of the class, gender
and ethnic determinations of the social and cultural relations of literary
production.
In a project on the 1930s it became clear that literature must be thought of
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not simply as possessing certain special qualities which either reveal or occlude
real historical processes to which the text refers, but as constituted within history
across a range of social institutions and practices, such as the education system,
publishing, libraries, book reviews and the broadcasting media. The literary
canon of great writing, for instance, is sanctioned and reproduced by a process of