Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sect. I. Some foundations. 1. 'Culture is ordinary' / Raymond Williams. 2. 'The rhetoric of the image' / Roland Barthes. 3. 'The television discourse - encoding and decoding' / Stuart Hall. 4. 'Soap opera and women' / Richard Dyer, Terry Lovell and Jean McCrindle. 5. 'Orientalism' / Edward Said. 6. 'Concepts of culture - public policy and the cultural industries' / Nicholas Garnham. 7. 'Reading Reading the Romance' / Janice Radway. 8. 'Cultural studies at the crossroads' / Graham Murdock -- Sect. II. Difference and identity. 9. 'Subcultural conflict and working-class community' / Phil Cohen. 10. 'Alice in the consumer wonderland' / Erica Carter. 11. 'Black and white on the dance-floor' / Paul Gilroy. 12. 'Minimal selves' / Stuart Hall. 13. 'Between holy text and moral void' / Bhikhu Parekh. 14. 'Technology and tradition - audio-visual culture among south Asian families in west London' / Marie Gillespie.

15. 'Just looking for trouble - Robert Mapplethorpe and fantasies of race' / Kobena Mercer -- Sect. III. Meaning and power. 16. 'Echoes of the present - the Victorian press and Ireland' / Liz Curtis. 17. 'Meaning and ideology' / Judith Williamson. 18. 'Postmodernism and consumer society' / Fredric Jameson. 19. 'Symbolic creativity' / Paul Willis. 20. 'The view from futures past' / Mike Davis. 21. 'Fictions of Europe' / Jan Nederveen Pieterse. 22. 'A global sense of place' / Doreen Massey.