Cultural Studies and the Novel

In this short article, Daly considers the history of literary cultural studies from its heyday in the 1990s to its current more modest position. There are a number of reasons one could adduce for its slide into relative marginality, including the predictable dilution of such a politically engaged approach within the academy as well as various external factors. However, Daly suggests that the single factor that has done most to dethrone cultural studies has not been institutional or external pressure but the internal tendencies of literary study as a field of practice. There are, nonetheless, various ways in which we can make more of the political legacy of cultural studies.