Culture, Capital and Carnival - by Will Kitchen (Hardcover)

About the Book

An interventional and highly interdisciplinary critical analysis of how work is represented in modern media, including literature, history, TV and film.

Book Synopsis

Culture, Capital and Carnival offers an interdisciplinary examination of how modern culture contextualises the values of labour.

How do the stories we consume represent work and shape its meaning in our lives? How has the history of modern art, critique and cultural production negotiated the idea of labour and the behaviours and beliefs which give it legitimacy and coherence? Beginning with a critique of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the 'carnivalesque', Culture, Capital and Carnival examines a diverse array of multimedia texts from the era of modern capitalism - including a mixture of canonical and culturally impactful novels, short stories, non-fiction, films and TV sitcoms - and addresses the various ideological tensions surrounding the representation of work.

Individual chapters look at how culture's various attempts to 'carnivalize' the values of labour can be challenged and ask whether critical representations can also perpetuate the values they seek to negate. By extending the author's previous work on the contemporary reinterpretation of Romanticism as an expansive modern phenomenon, Culture, Capital and Carnival adopts a radical critical perspective to explain how media products in the age of neoliberal capitalism can 'carnivalize' the values of modern capitalist labour even as they undermine economic and political freedom.

Review Quotes

"This is an exciting and wide-ranging illumination of work, capitalism and critique through reference to literature, film and television from across the last century and longer. It will make a positive contribution to understanding politics and everyday life in relation to modern media through topics from Romanticism to resentment." --Louis Bayman, Associate Professor, University of Southampton, UK

"Ranging across a large and transmedial body of materials, Will Kitchen's book offers a much-needed reassessment of the centrality of work in the contemporary cultural imaginary. In doing so, this excellent book offers incisive readings of individual texts, films, and TV series. But most importantly, it explains why and how work matters (and is likely to continue to matter) to the way we make sense of ourselves and the world." --Benjamin Kohlmann, Professor of English Literature, University of Regensburg, Germany

"We learn how to be a worker through TV, films and pop music. At the same time, much of popular culture contests the drabness of working lives with the carnival of musicals, cartoons and comedy. In this wide ranging and beautifully written book, Will Kitchen shows us how both of these truths are possible at the same time, and why we should never believe that culture is either ideology or resistance. You might never look at The Office in the same way again." --Martin Parker, Professor of Organization Studies, University of Bristol Business School, UK

"This important book burns with a fearless gaze at the iron masks of work discipline into which we ourselves lock our grinning heads every day. Will Kitchen has previously made us think anew about film and music in elegantly argued prose. Culture, Capital and Carnival continues the elegant readability of his previous volumes but issues an even more vital challenge: to look again at our attitudes to work and leisure, wage slavery and funfair freedoms, and how the media, even at their most apparently subversive and comical, powerfully encourage us to accept if not love our iron masks. This is a disturbing, brilliant yet humane book that we all need to read. It reminds us of something we knew but dared not think, that we need to stop laughing at work, open our eyes, and dare to change. I only wish I had written it myself." --Andrew King, Professor, University of Greenwich, UK

"Kitchen is one of the few scholars who combines lived experience with erudition, high with low culture, finely tuned analyses with broad brush overviews. If that wasn't enough he writes beautifully, argues persuasively and happily takes the readers through centuries of intellectual history. Scholarly enquiry doesn't get much better than that." --Anja Louis, Professor of Transnational Pop Culture, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

"This interdisciplinary examination of how modern culture and media contextualises the values of labour navigates skilfully and critically the application of complex academic concepts to the context of cultural production and modern capitalism. It is a critical contribution that demonstrates knowledge in breadth and depth in a way that is accessible and valuable to a wide audience." --Doris Schedlitzki, Professor of Organizational Leadership, London Metropolitan University, UK

"This book's original and exhilarating analysis of work practices as depicted in modern media offers a vital reassessment of leisure and revolt. Will Kitchen examines current 'biopolitical experience' in examples that range from George Orwell's novels to The Office and films including Boiling Point. The book draws on critics like Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Rancière to explore whether these texts can genuinely challenge and offer a refuge from work, or if they are inevitably incorporated back into capitalist values. Highly recommended for anyone who has experienced or witnessed employment in the contemporary world - that is, all of us." --Sue Vice, Professor of English Literature, University of Sheffield, UK

"Argued with force and conviction, Culture, Capital and Carnival shows how current cinema exploits the deeply rooted tradition of sanctioned misrule to sustain and, in the same breath, to critique the impact of autocratic control. Building on Adorno's negative dialectics, on Rancière's proletarian nights, Boltanski and Chiapello's studies of the "new spirit of capitalism," and others, Kitchen discerns areas in recent anglophone cinema where comedy and carnival saliently paper overs distressing and damaging effects of alienation, oppressive labor, social contradiction, and unconscionable sexual difference. We welcome his study with unbridled enthusiasm." --Tom Conley, Professor, Harvard University, USA

About the Author

Will Kitchen was Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Southampton and Visiting Tutor at the Bournemouth Film School, Arts University Bournemouth, UK. He is the author and editor of several books on modern culture and critical theory, including Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), ReFocus: The Films of Lindsay Anderson (2025) and Romanticism and Film: Franz Liszt and Audio-Visual Explanation (Bloomsbury, 2020).