| My thesis examines two different but related forms of “writing culture” in Britain in the nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties. First, it looks at the theoretical writing about culture by Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and members of the New Left. Second, it deals with the literary culture of the period: both the novelists and dramatists of the period known as the “Angry Young Men,” who were perceived to speak for a new post-war generation; and several women writers of the same period (A. S. Byatt, Lynne Reid Banks, Shelagh Delaney, and Doris Lessing) who, by contrast, failed to be seen as the representative voices of a new era. I argue that, together, the critical writing about culture and the “angry” novels and plays (such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, John Braine's Room at the Top, and Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) constituted an influential discourse about the relationship between culture, literature, and politics which shaped assumptions behind contemporary cultural studies, and affected the way in which the literary field of the fifties has been understood. Through close readings of selected literary and critical texts, and by examining the reception of these texts, I argue that the inclusive and egalitarian idea of culture which these texts promote is limited by two factors: by a shared fascination with the “scholarship boy,” and by the belief in culture as the primary means of social transformation. I look at the way in which the dominance of the scholarship boy helped produce a notion of cultural politics that excluded gender, and a notion of “engaged literature” that effectively excluded literature which focused on a female protagonist. I also argue that, at the same time as critics and writers tried to show that culture could be a political problem, they remained caught up in Leavisite/Arnoldian assumptions that culture was the solution to political problems; this is still a theoretical tension or contradiction at the heart of cultural studies today. |
