Extending Professor Sinfield's cultural criticism through to the 1990s, this edition offers both an historical account of the political change in the period since 1945 and a political approach to the literary and other cultural production that has been, in part, the agent and vehicle of that change. As concepts and institutions, literature and the arts have been marshalled within conflicting ideologies, elitist and egalitarian, so sustaining and disputing prevailing social relations. Literary representations have broached and contested fundamental questions about power and British society - questions of war and peace, nation and empire, gender and sexual orientation, class and political allegiance. In treating these literary and theoretical approaches Professor Sinfield emphasizes points where English literature intersects with its defining others - jazz and rock music, television, journalism, commercial and mass cultures, and the rapidly growing cutltural authority of the US.