Cultural Theory

This four volume collection addresses the central problem of the relation between culture and society. In doing so, it frames understandings of experience, text, meaning, power, stratification, identity, representation, practice, discourse, materiality, image, technology, and the many other concepts and categories in the context of this fundamental interrelationship.

Although the themes of culture and society provide the broad parameters of these four volumes, Cultural Theory makes visible some of the different objects of theoretical discourse that different schools of thought and theoretical paradigms have thrown before us. Traversing sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, literary theory, media and communication studies, and science and technology studies, this set covers the development and extension of cultural theory from its initial and longstanding questions about power and agency, ordinary and popular cultural practice, and representation to ones about the body, sensory experience and identity. It further addresses contemporary issues such as the changing natural and built environment, global humanity and justice, and the circulation of information, technology and value in the global cultural economy.

Throughout this collection, the editor offers a coherent, complex, and multiply-inflected narrative which is both grounded in the substantive histories of the field and oriented to its most exciting ideas and prospects.