This book is a pioneering attempt within the university study of English as a foreign language to provide the discipline of culture studies (particularly the study of American/British civilization) with a theory and methodology of its own. Focusing on the anthropological concept of culture as belief systems, the author suggests that culture studies should be primarily concerned with the analysis of the interplay between language and ideology. Essentially interdisciplinary, the field is conceived as a philological, text-oriented study of culture.