When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do the media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they be a force for good? When Richard Hoggart asked these questions in his 1957 book "The Uses of Literacy", Britain was undergoing huge social change, yet his landmark work has lost none of its pertinence and power today. Hoggart gives a fascinating insight into the close-knit values of Northern England's vanishing working-class communities, and weaves this together with his views on the arrival of a new, homogenous 'mass' US-influenced culture. His headline-grabbing bestseller opened up a whole new area of cultural study and remains essential reading, both as a historical document, and as a commentary on class, poverty and the media.

这是一本国外青年文化研究的译著。此书为《通过仪式抵抗》的修订扩充版，包含一篇新序言。该序言向读者全面介绍了自从这本著作1975年在《文化研究工作论文集》（working papers in Cultural Studies，简称WPCS）合刊上初版以来所发生的变化。
伯明翰当代文化研究中心的工作,由于富有历史性地引领了一个新的文化研究领域而闻名；该中心产生的这些论文，也成为许多攻读文化研究学位的学生们必读的经典著作。此修订本包括了初版收录的所有富有独创性的论文，并增加了本书主编在该书出版30年之后所作的反思，后者进一步充实了这些论文的内容。
当青年文化已经广泛呈现在公共视野的时候，却很少有人能认识到这是社会政治变革最为显著和引人注目的表现；这些论文正好在此时发表，从而改变了这种状况。《通过仪式抵抗》通过详细考察战后英国出现的广泛的青年亚文化现象（从泰迪男孩[Teddy boys]、摩登族[mods]、光头党[skinheads]到黑人拉斯特法里派[Rastafarians]），讨论了青年文化究竟是如何反映和应对文化变革的。
该书体现了这个引领当代文化研究的伯明翰中心的集体认知，有助于在新世纪对20世纪的一些重要文化著作进行重新定位。