Francis Mulhern

In What Is Cultural Criticism?, Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini propose alternative understandings of what 'culture' means: is it a rear-guard projection of values excluded by capitalist modernity, or a useful shorthand for a set of collectively practised prompts to reflection? The debate opens with Mulhern’s account in Culture/Metaculture of what he terms metacultural discourse. This has embraced two opposing...

Into the Melée collects Francis Mulhern's insightful critical writing, much of it in the hybrid literary form that Bagehot described as 'the review-like essay and the essay-like review'. It opens with questions of nationality, from F. R. Leavis's efforts to assert a normatively English literary subject and Ferdinand Mount's exploration of English cultural landscapes to Tom Nairn's political vision of...