This book arises from reading and teaching Gramscian work in cultural studies, education, media studies, leisure and politics over the last twenty years. It argues that Gramscian work is undoubtedly powerful and persuasive. Indeed by the 1990s one can almost say that it has become the governing orthodoxy. THis book tries to read the work critically and in detail, tracing arguments across time and across different specialisms, assessing them, and trying to examine how they deal with critics and with new challenging topics. He maintains that cultural studies contains many absences, silences and closures, and that it deploys a number of narrative techniques to remain credible. Wide-ranging and critical, the book provides an ideal critical assessment of one of the most fashionable and powerful intellectual traditions in contemporary social science. This book will appeal especially to students in cultural studies, media studies, leisure studies, education and the sociology of culture. They will find a way of critically reading Gramscian work which should enable them to decide where its strengths and weaknesses lie, and make them less dependent on the Gramscians' own accounts and agendas.