Elitism: a progressive defence
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 3249
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Biteback Publishing
- ISBN
- 9781785906077
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 19 - Politics and International Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book documents and analyses anti-elitism in contemporary media commentary and political discourse. Drawing on my journalistic work on this topic, and employing persuasive, rhetorical and literary techniques (for example applying the tools of literary criticism to non-literary texts including political speeches, media commentary, and grant-giving guidance), the book unpicks the current elision of educational and cultural elitism on the one hand, and financial privilege on the other (the assumption that elite ideas and cultural production and aesthetic discernment are bound up with social and economic status). This book employs an original examination of the tropes, assumptions, and expectations created and deployed by grant bid guidance and funding stipulations, which enables me to show how culture and education are being made to function as symbolic arenas of democratisation, which serve as smokescreens for enduring socio-economic inequality. This argument has not – to my knowledge – been made before: ‘outreach’, ‘audience engagement’, and ‘interactivity’ being overwhelmingly terms of approval in educational, cultural, and media discourse. Building on works such as Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (Continuum, 2007), and drawing on a revisionist approach established by scholars including Raymond Williams, Jonathan Rose, and Mark Fisher, I apply this approach to more contemporary anti-elitism, while being the first book – as far as I can establish – to place contemporary trends in the context of a more well-established historic anti-intellectual genealogy that takes in the Know Nothing movement of mid nineteenth century America and the anti-cosmopolitan Judeophobia of Nazi Germany. And I draw out an alternative tradition, from eighteenth-century definitions of beauty, through the ideas of William Morris and nineteenth-century workers’ education initiatives, to twentieth-century avant-garde art and theatre, which envisages the most challenging ideas and the highest cultural forms as being fully accessible to the least prosperous audiences and readerships.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
