Abstract
In Cultural Populism, Jim McGuigan argues that in British cultural studies ‘there
is populist sentiment, but hardly any “sentimentality” is discernible’. There is,
however, an arena of British cultural studies that has always been concerned with
‘sentiment’ and that is the romance narrative. This article argues that the study of
popular fictions has always been integral to the history of cultural studies, and that it
established a site in which feminist voices would make gender politics intrinsic to the
field. At a time when gender was not a central issue for either Literature or Cultural
Studies, generic fictions written by and for women provided a site for research that
was undeniably about female experience, and the analysis of those texts offered a
strategy for asserting a feminist focus.
is populist sentiment, but hardly any “sentimentality” is discernible’. There is,
however, an arena of British cultural studies that has always been concerned with
‘sentiment’ and that is the romance narrative. This article argues that the study of
popular fictions has always been integral to the history of cultural studies, and that it
established a site in which feminist voices would make gender politics intrinsic to the
field. At a time when gender was not a central issue for either Literature or Cultural
Studies, generic fictions written by and for women provided a site for research that
was undeniably about female experience, and the analysis of those texts offered a
strategy for asserting a feminist focus.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 900-914 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | European Journal of Cultural Studies |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 19 Sept 2020 |
Bibliographical note
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Keywords
- cultural populism
- romance
- soap opera
- feminist theory
- literature
- popular fiction
- Feminism
- women’s writing