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History of English Literature

Notes modernist literature struggled with the new realm of subject matter brought about by an
increasingly industrialized and globalized world.
In its earliest incarnations, modernism fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations
happening in the fields of anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and
psychoanalysis. Writers as Ezra Pound and other poets of the Imagist movement characterized this
exuberant spririt, rejecting the sentiment and discursiveness typical of Romanticism and Victorian
literature for poetry that instead favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language.
This new idealism ended, however, with the outbreak of war, when writers began to generate
more cynical postwar works that reflected prevailing sense disillusionment and fragmented
thought. Many modernist writers shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government
and religion, and rejected the notion of absolute truths. Like T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Wasteland,
later modernist works were increasingly self-aware, introspective, and often embraced the
unconscious fears of a darker humanity.

32.3.1 Growth and Development
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally
concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts,
and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural anthropology and
ethnic studies in both objective and methodology. Researchers concentrate on how a particular
medium or message relates to matters of ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality,
and/or gender.
Cultural studies approaches subjects holistically, combining feminist theory, social theory, political
theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication
studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/criticism to study
cultural phenomena in various societies.

Notes Cultural studies seeks to understand the ways in which meaning is generated,
disseminated, and produced through various practices, beliefs, institutions, and
political, economic, or social structures within a given culture.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of
cultural studies after the field’s inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies
was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P.
Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views,
and criticisms of popular culture as ‘capitalist’ mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the
Frankfurt School critique of the “culture industry” (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings
of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond
Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.
In contrast, “cultural studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition” in the
United States. The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with
understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass
culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of
fandom. The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.
In Canada, cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing
the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan and others. In Australia, there has sometimes been
a special emphasis on cultural policy. In South Africa, human rights and Third World issues are
among the topics treated. There were a number of exchanges between Birmingham and Italy,
resulting in work on Italian leftism, and theories of postmodernism. On the other hand, there is a
debate in Latin America about the relevance of cultural studies, with some researchers calling for

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