Cultural Studies Texts

The first of Angelou's autobiographical works, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings provides a frank look at the author's childhood, dealing with themes of racial discrimination, segregation, and d...

Best known as the source text for Kubrick's movie, this novel is set in a near-future where teen gangs are running wild and engaging in acts of brutal violence, until a revolutionary—and controve...

Franzen's epic saga of American life follows the trials and tribulations of the Berglund family, exploring the dynamics of nuclear family lifestyle in modern-day America. Dramatic as the novel is,...

A quintessential "beat" poem, "America is frenzied, eclectic, and unpolished. Given that it's part of a collection called Howl, it's fitting that it reads as an epic rant—in this case, against th...

Laying the groundwork for Rand's way-more-famous later works, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), Anthem encapsulates the themes that Rand was to explore throughout he...

More Grimm (not to mention grim) than Disney, this collection is made up of poetic retellings of classic fairytales. The story of Cinderella is so well known that it's become a cliché, and Sexton'...

Way before Ayn Rand took a stab at sci-fi, Shelley's original Frankenstein tapped into the scientific advances and experimentations of the day to depict Doctor Victor Frankenstein and his frea...

In this parable, Steinbeck tells the tale of a couple whose lives are changed forever after finding a pearl that they believe will end all their problems. Sounds simple, right? As it turns out, the...

Stoppard's play is a fresh take on Hamlet, in which he lifts two of the minor comedic yet ill-fated characters from Shakespeare's play and revamps the plot so that it plays out from their perspecti...

Modern cultural studies may focus on ways in which people create their own meanings out of mass culture, but in the days of the Frankfurt school, this was a whole other kettle of culturally determi...

The subject matter and analytic approach Barthes presents in Mythologies later became popularized within the cultural studies branch of academia because they applied to more than just myth in the o...

Feminist criticism has become a major part of cultural studies research, and if there's one name that stands out in this area it's Butler. In this book, Butler channels the spirit of Michel Foucaul...

This collection was—and is—a cornerstone of cultural studies in the United States. The book reads like a "who's who" of international researchers on cultural studies-y topics and covers pretty...

The great grandpappy of cultural studies texts, this book focuses on the impact of mass production on working-class culture in the United Kingdom. Totally relevant today, right? What's still key, t...

McRobbie was one of the major feminist voices in the Birmingham school and produced a range of studies—such as on teen girls' magazines, which is a surprisingly fruitful spot for cultural analysi...

No cultural studies bibliography would be complete without Hall. In fact, there's a whole hall of texts that could be included here (well, a couple shelves, at least). This book is the prime go-to...

You can't discuss cultural studies or cultural phenomena without thinking about the word "culture" itself, and that's where Williams comes in. Williams makes sure you know that it's not like "cultu...