Before the midpoint of the twentieth century, culture as a subject was routinely relegated to the background of any period’s study. From the 1950s on, however, it moved very clearly to the foreground. Suddenly culture was everywhere: no longer the property of an elite, the masses had a culture and culture had a mass. Accordingly, the study of culture and the critique of culture became an increasingly central part of political and intellectual life…the cultural turn, as it came to be known in the humanities and social sciences. This book is a product of and a reflection on that cultural turn, which Michael Denning argues was a fundamental aspect of the age of three worlds, that short half-century (1945–1989) when it was imagined that the world was divided into three…the capitalist first world, the communist second world, and the decolonizing third world.

Recasting the legacies of British cultural studies and the radical traditions of the American studies movement in a global context, Denning analyses the political and intellectual battles over the meanings of culture, addresses the rise of a distinctive “American ideology” based on this short “American century,” and charts the lineaments of the global cultures that emerged as three worlds gave way to one.

Praise for previous books:

“An immense achievement … the most important book yet written on American culture in the age of the CIO.” … Michael Rogin on The Cultural Front

“A fresh and methodologically pathbreaking look at popular or mass-cultural narrative and its ideological function in a specific formative period of North American modernity.” … Fredric Jameson on Mechanic Accents

“One of the most illuminating, theoretically informed accounts of popular fiction now available.” – Terry Eagleton

Michael Denning is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Among his many publications are Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America and The Cultural Front The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, both from Verso.
Publication
Jan. 2004

280 pages


Cloth
1 85984 577 0
US$65 / £45 / CAN$100

Paper
1 85984 449 9
US$19 / £13 / CAN$29