The Cultural Return

This insightful book tracks the concept of culture across a range of scholarly disciplines and much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—years that saw the emergence of new fields and subfields (cultural studies, the new cultural history, literary new historicism, as well as ethnic and minority studies) and came to be called “the cultural turn.” Since the 1990s, however, the idea of culture has fallen out of scholarly favor. Susan Hegeman engages with a diversity of disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and political science, to historicize the rise and fall of the cultural turn and to propose ways that culture may still be a vital concept in the global present.

Susan Hegeman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida and is the author of Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Cultural Discontents
2. Haunted by Mass Culture
3. A Brief History of the Cultural Turn
4. Globalization, Culture, and Crises of Disciplinarity
5. The Santa Claus Problem: Culture, Belief, Modernity
6. The Cultural Return

Notes
Index