Andrew Milner and Jeffrey Browitt, Contemporary Cultural Theory. 3rd Ed. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2002. ISBN: 1865088080 [Book review]

The third and most recent edition of Contemporary Cultural Theory, now a collaborative work of Andrew Milner and Jeffrey Browitt, sees also the revision of most of the text. It should surprise few that the third edition displays an even greater range of contemporary theoretical approaches to the analysis of culture. It goes without saying that such a smorgasbord will always come at the expense of considered digestion. But this is not the aim of the text. As Milner and Browitt state in the first chapter, “the greater promise [of defining cultural studies] lies . . . not in the discovery of a new subject matter, nor even in the ‘deconstruction’ of the disciplinary boundaries that demarcated literature from fiction, art from culture, elite from popular; but rather in the development of new methods of analysis for both” (9).