Class Routledge The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture / Class and Conjuncture in Television, Cinema and Literature / 2026

This book presents a critical examination of how cultural forms, ranging from cinema and TV to literature, address class within the overarching context of a crisis conjuncture--specifically the period following the 2008 financial crash--and demonstrates how culture serves as a site for capturing the contemporary "structure of feeling".

This book presents a critical examination of how cultural forms, ranging from cinema and TV to literature, address class within the overarching context of a crisis conjuncture, specifically the period following the 2008 financial crash. It demonstrates how culture serves as a crucial site for capturing the contemporary "structure of feeling", publicly mediating the period's pervasive social anxieties, latent aspirations and political antagonisms.

Methodologically, the book bridges critical political economy and cultural theory, to analyse the environmental, political, humanitarian and economic symptoms of the late capitalist crisis as represented in culture. Through its dissection of both major and minor works across genres (such as satire, horror and autofiction) produced in the centres and peripheries of global capitalism, the book highlights how class experiences like privilege, precarity and ressentiment are narrativized. Findings reveal that while commercial media often reproduce middle-class hegemony through ethical but depoliticized critiques of capitalism, minor works engage more substantively with proletarian struggles and lost revolutionary futures. Underscoring culture’s dual role in sustaining and challenging neoliberal ideology, it argues that emergent oppositional practices rooted in historical memory offer potential pathways for the development of class consciousness.

Bridging theory and praxis, it will appeal not only to scholars interested in cultural sociology, literature, and politics but also to those in the arts, and to students of media, sociology, cinema, literature and cultural studies.