Overview

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 centers 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 not only appeal to scholars interested in cultural sociology, literature, and politics, but to those in the arts, and to students of media, sociology, cinema, literature, and cultural studies.

Full Product Details

9781032900889

Table of Contents

Reviews

'This ambitious work makes a significant contribution to radical political theory and media studies. It connects working-class experience beyond narrow economic terms to wider questions of media, environment, and public life. The analysis is explicitly political, providing the theoretical tools to link aesthetic forms with concrete historical, social, and cultural realities. It engages with the working class not merely as an economic category, but as a living social force shaped through the dialectical interaction of experience, cultural narratives, and material conditions. Rejecting the current academic drift toward subjectivism, identity politics, and anti-empiricism, it focuses attention on material politics—it’s essential reading for anyone, inside or outside the academy, interested in forms of politics too often ignored or suppressed in contemporary scholarship.' Dr Deirdre O'Neill, lecturer at Hertfordshire University

Author Information

Yiannis Mylonas is Associate Professor in Media and Culture at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, in Moscow. He is the author of The ‘Greek Crisis’ in Europe: Race, Class and Politics and editor of Class, Culture, and the Media in Greece Volumes 1 & 2 (2024).

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