A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole and typically on a radical basis.^{[citation needed]} There is significant overlap with social and cultural theory.

Contemporary usage has tended to include all types of criticism directed at culture.

The term cultural criticism itself has been claimed by Jacques Barzun: No such thing was recognized or in favour when we [i.e. Barzun and Trilling] began — more by intuition than design — in the autumn of 1934. In contrast, a work such as Richard Wolin's 1995 The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1995) uses it as a broad-brush description.

Cultural critics came to the scene in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle are leading examples of a cultural critic of the Victorian age; in Arnold there is also a concern for religion. John Ruskin was another. Because of an equation made between ugliness of material surroundings and an impoverished life, aesthetes and others might be considered implicitly to be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic. In France, Charles Baudelaire was a cultural critic, as was Søren Kierkegaard in Denmark and Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany.

Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks (intentionally uncapitalized), is an American author, feminist, and social activist. She took her nom de plume from her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks.

Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, capitalism, and gender and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern perspective, hooks has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She grew up in a working class family with five sisters and one brother. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. Throughout her childhood, she was an avid reader.

Camille Anna Paglia (English pronunciation: /ˈpɑːliə/), (born April 2, 1947) is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984. She is the author of the best-selling 1990 work of literary criticism Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and four other books, including essay collections, a study of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and Break, Blow, Burn on poetry. She writes articles on art, popular culture, feminism, and politics for mainstream newspapers and magazines. Paglia has celebrated Madonna and taken radical libertarian positions on controversial social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and drug use. She is known as a critic of American feminism, and is also strongly critical of the influence of French writers such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

Edmund Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is an American novelist, as well as a writer of memoirs and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. Probably his best-known books are The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) (written with Charles Silverstein) and his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).

Edmund Valentine White was born in the United States of America on 13 January 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Incestuous feelings existed in White's family; his mother was attracted to him. White spoke of his own sexual attraction to his father in an interview: "I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!" He has also stated: "Writing has always been my recourse when I've tried to make sense of my experience or when it's been very painful. When I was 15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a time when there were no other gay novels. So I was really inventing a genre, and it was a way of administering a therapy to myself, I suppose."

William Deresiewicz (pronounced /dəˈrɛzəwɪts/ də-REZ-əwits) (born 1964 in Englewood, New Jersey) is an American writer and literary critic. He was an English professor at Yale University from 1998 to 2008. Previously, he taught at Columbia University, where he received his bachelors and PhD.

His criticism directed at a popular audience appears in The Nation,The American Scholar, the London Review of Books,The New Republic, and The New York Times. More often than not controversial, his negative reviews of Terry Eagleton,Zadie Smith, and Richard Powers drew heated reactions within the literary community. He was nominated for National Magazine Awards in 2008, 2009, and 2011 and for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2010, 2011, and 2012. A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter was published in 2011 by Penguin Press. His academic work Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets was published by Columbia University Press in 2004.