For years Richard Hoggart has observed the oddity of a common speech habit: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths, a disinclination to form our own sentences "from scratch," unless that becomes inescapable. But in this book he is interested in more specific questions. How far do the British, and particularly the English, share the same sayings across the social classes? If each group uses some different ones, are those differences determined by location, age, occupation or place in the social scale? Over the years, did such sayings indicate some of the main lines of their culture, its basic conditions, its stresses and strains, its indications of meaning, and significance? These and other concerns animate this fascinating exploration of how the English, and particularly working-class English, use the English language.Hoggart sets the stage by explaining how he has approached his subject matter, his manner of inquiry, and the general characteristics of sayings and speech. Looking back into time, he explores the idioms and epigrams in the poverty setting of the early working-class English. Hoggart examines the very innards of working-class life and the idioms, with the language that arose in relation to home, with its main characters of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, and children; the wars; marriage; food, drink, health, and weather; neighbors, gossip, quarrels, old age, and death. He discusses related idioms and epigrams and their evolution from prewar to present.Hoggart identifies the sayings and special nuances of the English working-class people that have made them identifiable as such, from the rude and obscene to the intellectual and imaginative. Hoggart also examines the areas of tolerance, local morality, and public morality, elaborating on current usage of words that have evolved from the fourteen through the eighteenth centuries. He touches on religion, superstition, and time, the beliefs that animate language. And finally, he focuses on aphorisms and social change and the emerging idioms of relativism, concluding that many early adages still in use seem to refuse to die.With inimitable verve and humor, Hoggart offers adages, apothegms, epigrams and the like in this colorful examination drawn from the national pool and the common culture. This volume will interest scholars and general readers interested in culture studies, communications, and education.

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing. Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances. Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed. In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

For years Richard Hoggart has observed the oddity of a common speech habit: the fondness for employing ready-made sayings and phrasings whenever we open our mouths, a disinclination to form our own sentences "from scratch, " unless that becomes inescapable. But in this book he is interested in more specific questions. How far do the British, and particularly the English, share the same sayings across the social classes? If each group uses some different ones, are those differences determined by location, age, occupation or place in the social scale? Over the years, did such sayings indicate some of the main lines of their culture, its basic conditions, its stresses and strains, its indications of meaning, and significance? These and other concerns animate this fascinating exploration of how the English, and particularly working-class English, use the English language.

Hoggart sets the stage by explaining how he has approached his subject matter, his manner of inquiry, and the general characteristics of sayings and speech. Looking back into time, he explores the idioms and epigrams in the poverty setting of the early working-class English. Hoggart examines the very innards of working-class life and the idioms, with the language that arose in relation to home, with its main characters of wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, and children; the wars; marriage; food, drink, health, and weather; neighbors, gossip, quarrels, old age, and death. He discusses related idioms and epigrams and their evolution from prewar to present.

Hoggart identifies the sayings and special nuances of the English working-class people that have made them identifiable as such, from the rude and obscene to theintellectual and imaginative. Hoggart also examines the areas of tolerance, local morality, and public morality, elaborating on current usage of words that have evolved from the fourteen through the eighteenth centuries. He touches on religion, superstition, and time, the beliefs that animate language. And finally, he focuses on aphorisms and social change and the emerging idioms of relativism, concluding that many early adages still in use seem to refuse to die.

With inimitable verve and humor, Hoggart offers adages, apothegms, epigrams and the like in this colorful examination drawn from the national pool and the common culture. This volume will interest scholars and general readers interested in culture studies, communications, and education.

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing.

Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.

Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed.

In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

Has legislation over-reached itself? The contributors to this volume discuss whether the increase in legislative instruments of many kinds, often promoted with good intentions, may be progressively limiting both our individual and our communal freedoms. Contributors include Bernard Crick, Maurice Peston and James Ferman discuss this key idea in accessible and forthright style.

A searing account of George Orwell’s experiences of working- class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity.

When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do the media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they be a force for good? When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 book The Uses of Literacy Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his landmark work has lost none of its pertinence and power today. Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous 'mass' US-influenced culture. His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

The outstanding quality of Richard Hoggart's new book is its warmth. In the style of Montaigne, Hoggart looks back over his years and pinpoints those human qualities which have come to mean most to him and which he has appreciated in others. Part of this man's attraction derives from the fact that he is also extremely self-effacing. Literacy and the use of language remain an abiding concern of Professor Hoggart but he also analyses in these pages the nature of human courage, the uses of memory, the true purposes of education, love and charity, and the approach of the Grim Reaper. Throughout, Hoggart considers the public ideas and events which have interested him, and their intertwinings with his personal life. Examples would be- the family, politics, the intellectual life, beliefs and morals, words and writing. All of these are looked at through what the author describes as his 'time telescope'. Thus this book is not a theoretical or abstract record. Its argument is illustrated from life. We live in the age of the cult of youth and personality. Our lives are increasingly driven and influenced by The Media.But in these pages is contained the wisdom of one of the most astute and perceptive of our contemporary critics - a literary, social and cultural judge who is also very greatly loved by his admirers.

Richard Hoggart, famous for his writings on literature, education, and the means of communication, and especially for his influential book The Uses of Literacy, has written a new work in which he looks at the ways in which mass communications in the twenty-first century both encourage and hinder greater understanding of the modern world. Hoggart takes a number of aspects of mass society today - celebrity worship, youth culture, broadcasting, and a decline in the proper use of language - and considers the paradox that the ready accessibility of information of all types does not automatically lead to greater comprehension of our world. Information itself is inert and only leads to knowledge if it has been ordered and assessed. He assesses the slow but uninterrupted dissolution of old beliefs, in particular the widespread corruption of language. He analyses the erosion of the traditional pillars of authority throughout a century and a half of sustained intellectual criticism of existing assumptions and beliefs, especially in the religious sphere. Throughout the book, he examines broadcasting as the prime disseminator of mass information. truest form, and sees the Public Service ideal as coming increasingly under attack from today's BBC broadcasters. People who seem to believe that the overwhelming function of television today is to entertain.