lOMoARcPSD|1485157
Week one - Moral Panic, Youth Culture, Popular Music and
Social History. Dr Ros Watkiss
Youth Culture and Popular Music in Twentieth Century Britain (University of
Wolverhampton)
Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university
Downloaded by Ellie Dolman ()
, lOMoARcPSD|1485157
Moral Panic, Youth Culture, Popular Music and Social History. Dr Ros Watkiss
Singleton
MH029/ .
Cultural Studies in Britain
• F. R. Leavis (1895-1978): folk culture - mass culture
• Culture = moral and aesthetic value
• Writings formed inter-war critique of contemporary culture
• Relationship between cultural elitism and class
Britain in the 1950s
• Cultural studies advanced in line with research on working class
communities
• Expansion adult education and injection of working class tutors into
universities
• Affluence and 1950s
• Britain in transition: dilution of class and growth of mass consumption
Richard Hoggart (1918- 2014)
• Working class background in Leeds - into university sector
• The Uses of Literacy (1957) part autobiography
• Earlier working class culture (allotments, pubs, education, clubs)
• Mass culture (pop music, television, magazines, crime novels)
The Uses of Literacy (1957)
• Many of the customers - their clothes, their hair-styles, their facial
expressions all indicate - are living to a large extent in a myth-world …
They form a depressing group and by no means typical of working-class
people; perhaps most of them are rather less intelligent than the average,
and are therefore even more exposed than others to the debilitating
mass-trends of the day. They have no aim, no protection, no belief’ (pp
248-9).
Raymond Williams (1921-1988)
• Working class Wales
• Culture represented ‘a whole way of life’
• Culture and Society (1958): shared Hoggart’s pessimism but not totally
dismissive of mass culture
• He celebrated jazz and football but deplored the trash novel and the
popular press
Edward Thompson (1924-1993)
Downloaded by Ellie Dolman ()
Week one - Moral Panic, Youth Culture, Popular Music and
Social History. Dr Ros Watkiss
Youth Culture and Popular Music in Twentieth Century Britain (University of
Wolverhampton)
Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university
Downloaded by Ellie Dolman ()
, lOMoARcPSD|1485157
Moral Panic, Youth Culture, Popular Music and Social History. Dr Ros Watkiss
Singleton
MH029/ .
Cultural Studies in Britain
• F. R. Leavis (1895-1978): folk culture - mass culture
• Culture = moral and aesthetic value
• Writings formed inter-war critique of contemporary culture
• Relationship between cultural elitism and class
Britain in the 1950s
• Cultural studies advanced in line with research on working class
communities
• Expansion adult education and injection of working class tutors into
universities
• Affluence and 1950s
• Britain in transition: dilution of class and growth of mass consumption
Richard Hoggart (1918- 2014)
• Working class background in Leeds - into university sector
• The Uses of Literacy (1957) part autobiography
• Earlier working class culture (allotments, pubs, education, clubs)
• Mass culture (pop music, television, magazines, crime novels)
The Uses of Literacy (1957)
• Many of the customers - their clothes, their hair-styles, their facial
expressions all indicate - are living to a large extent in a myth-world …
They form a depressing group and by no means typical of working-class
people; perhaps most of them are rather less intelligent than the average,
and are therefore even more exposed than others to the debilitating
mass-trends of the day. They have no aim, no protection, no belief’ (pp
248-9).
Raymond Williams (1921-1988)
• Working class Wales
• Culture represented ‘a whole way of life’
• Culture and Society (1958): shared Hoggart’s pessimism but not totally
dismissive of mass culture
• He celebrated jazz and football but deplored the trash novel and the
popular press
Edward Thompson (1924-1993)
Downloaded by Ellie Dolman ()
