What is Cultural Criticism? Verso Reading

What exactly is cultural criticism? What is the role of the cultural critic? And how can we deepen our engagement with contemporary society, politics, and philosophy?

Inspired by Stefan Collini and Francis Mulhern’s new book, What Is Cultural Criticism?, we have curated a list of works that offer key insights into the field. 

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What Is Cultural Criticism?

by Stefan Collini and Francis Mulhern

In What Is Cultural Criticism?, two leading critics grapple with problems of literature, politics and intellectual practice. The debate opens with Francis Mulhern’s account of what he terms ‘metacu...

Into the Melée

by Francis Mulhern

Into the Mêlée probes the mercurial relationship between culture and politics through versatile critical writing on Conrad, Orwell, Sartre, Raymond Williams and Roberto Schwarz, among others. The ‘...

Ideology

by Terry Eagleton

Ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact, and so little understood as a concept, as it is today. In this now classic work, originally written for both students and for those alr...

Culture and Politics

by Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of cultural and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of whic...

Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...

The Function of Criticism

by Terry Eagleton

This wide-ranging book argues that criticism emerged in early bourgeois society as a central feature of a “public sphere” in which political, ethical, and literary judgements could mingle under the...

The Task of the Critic

by Terry Eagleton

Edited by Matthew Beaumont

Terry Eagleton occupies a unique position in the English-speaking world today. He is not only a productive literary theorist, but also a novelist and playwright. He remains a committed socialist de...

Minima Moralia

by Theodor Adorno

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-cen...

The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life

by Kristin Ross

The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross's attempt to think the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual a...

Marxist Modernism

by Gillian Rose

Afterword by Martin Jay

Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: ...

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

by Anna Kornbluh

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but f...

Invisibility Blues

by Michele Wallace

First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...