A Welcome Back to the Working Class

Abstract

S. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, £40.00 (£14.95 paperback), xi+312 pp. (ISBN 0-521-65066-6, ISBN 0-521-65915-9)

S. Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class. London: Cassell, 2000, £45 (£19.99 paperback), ix+241 pp. (ISBN 0-3047-0584-9, ISBN 0-3047-0549-7)

A. Milner, Core Cultural Concepts: Class. London: Sage, 1999, £40.00 (£12.99 paperback), ix+198 pp. (ISBN 0-7619-5244-6, ISBN 0-7619-5245-4)

Three books on working-class culture, although unexpected given the preoccupations of Cultural Studies over the past decade and a half, are both welcome and timely. The recent stirrings of a debate about class that emerged after Gordon Brown's criticism of Oxbridge and its exclusion of working-class students were seemingly curtailed by political expediency and the fear of provoking old ghosts. Despite the subsequent silence around the wider discriminations that the episode chosen by Brown alludes to, class continues to haunt British cultural and social life. However, there is now a blatantly obvious lacuna in qualitative work on class, and academics seem particularly squeamish when the subject of the working class is raised.