Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Theories of Contemporary Culture) [Paperback]

Meaghan Morris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 1998 | Series: Theories of Contemporary Culture (Book 22)

What good is history to cultural studies? Meaghan Morris looks at struggles over "history" in social settings created by capitalism: in tourist landscapes and in television time. The materials of her analysis are motels, shopping malls, beaches, and local politics. She focuses on history and cultural heritage as issues of controversy for white working-class and poor suburban communities, as well as for urban cultural elites.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In my opinion, Meaghan Morris is perhaps the most original practitioner of cultural studies in the English-speaking world... Too Soon Too Late continues the effort to forge an original and experimental practice of cultural studies, and confronts one of the most interesting questions I can imagine: How does history function, not as an intellectual or academic enterprise, but as a popular practice and desire? What is the place of history in everyday life? In a series of sometimes bizarre but always beautiful, engaging and brilliantly insightful essays, Morris gives a new power to history and to language." —International Journal of Communication

(International Journal of Communication )

About the Author

Meaghan Morris, Australian Research Council Senior Fellow at University of Technology, Sydney, is the author of several works of feminist cultural theory, including The Pirate's Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism and co-editor of Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (August 22, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253211883
• ISBN-13: 978-0253211880
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cultural criticism at its global/local wry perverse best..., May 8, 2000

By 

Rob Wilson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Theories of Contemporary Culture) (Paperback)

Meaghan Morris, early and late, writes cultural criticism at its global/local,wry perverse best. Lest this sound too late-capitalist cynical or rude, I should say that she writes from and as the local and national site of Australia, making this political and libidinal space of transnational cultural studies resonate with the most urgent, critical, and international issues that trouble our politics and poetics.

As such, she reinvents Asia/Pacific as she writes, showing us (or should I say the writerly obsessive "me") how to work and affiliate in a space of writing and moral-political concern. When I read her essays, I face the panic white sublimity of awe and admiration, clotted and displaced. She invents topics and tropes for each essay or book, reframing tourism, mass media, film, movement, embodied location, identity, without falling into the "banality of cultural studies" or the throwaway language and motel spaces that haunt our politics.

She is an untimely critic, whose writing is both too soon and too late for the market. But the "tyranny of space" in the Pacific has been overcome, and I for one am very grateful such an artist and cultural critic and scholar exists all packed into one person, Meaghan Morris.