Owing to the need for a post-publication amendment to the article, a correction has been published.

Hayward KJ (2015) Cultural criminology: Script rewrites. Theoretical Criminology. Epub ahead of print 18 December 2015. DOI: 10.1177/1362480615619668.

Following the publication of this article, the author has revised the second paragraph on page eight under the heading ‘Romance everywhere?’ as a professional courtesy. The new paragraph is as follows and will be incorporated in future versions of this article.

Here, as mentioned above, the charge is that, by focusing on forms of ‘criminal edgework’ or ‘low-level transgression’, cultural criminologists are simply repeating the mistakes of earlier versions of critical criminology. Roger Matthews (2014a: 97, 115), for example, cautions that ‘by focusing on selected forms of micro resistance, narratives of dissent and alternative life-styles, cultural criminologists are in danger of engaging in the kind of romanticism associated with left idealism’. But for this line of argument to stack up, the alleged parallels between left idealism and cultural criminology need to be carefully articulated and theoretically substantiated. It is not enough, as certain commentators have tended to do, simply to equate two decades of diverse cultural criminological research with, say, the study of graffiti. By stating this I do not wish to imply that cultural criminologists have not undertaken a number of appreciative studies of subcultural groups—they clearly have. It is to point out that, if critics wish us to treat this ‘romanticization’ accusation seriously, they should demonstrate its existence by providing concrete examples, citing key works when the offender is actually romanticized and highlighting precisely how the alleged process of romanticization takes place.