A CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACH TO A NOVELIST AT THE CROSSROADS
A CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACH TO A NOVELIST AT THE CROSSROADS

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the current text is to place David Lodge’s early fiction (especially The British Museum is Falling Down) within the new cultural contexts emerging in the 1960s, among which the ones associated with the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies feature prominently. There arose new voices advocating the ordinariness of the culture shared by most British people at that time and since then and the failure of traditional institutions to support as convincingly as previously what one has come to call canonical, elite culture. Apart from the unity in diversity that important thinkers usually display, there are important features which they share, particularly in relation to a certain paradigm shift concerning attitudes to what culture has become and to its pivotal institutions and practices. Are these institutions falling down or, if not, to what extent are they affected by the new cultural, especially Cultural Studies turn? The Cultural Studies thinkers and some of the literary writers of the age refer, sometimes from different ideological positions (Lodge and Larkin from more conservative, but equally critical and ironic and self-ironic ones), to the new challenges to Englishness and its central position in the cultural institutional dynamics of the time.

• Details
• Contents