Inventing The Popular

Inventing the Popular: Working-Class Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France explores texts written, published and disseminated by a politically and socially active group of working-class writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a network of exchanges featuring newspapers, poems and prose fiction, these writers embraced a vision of popular culture that represented a clear departure from more traditional oral and printed forms of popular expression; at the same time, their writing strategically resisted nascent forms of mass culture, including the daily press and the serial novel. Coming into writing at a time when Romanticism had expanded beyond the borders of the lyric je, these poets explored the social dimensions of connectivity and social relation finding interlocutors and supporters in the likes of Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand and Eugène Sue. The relationships they developed among themselves and the major figures of an increasingly socially-oriented Romanticism were as rich with emancipatory promise as well as with reactionary temptation. They constitute an extensive archive of everyday life and utopian anticipation that reframe social romanticism as a revelatory if problematic model of engaged writing.

John Storey, a leading figure in the field of Cultural Studies, offers an illuminating and vibrant account of the development of popular culture. Addressing issues such as globalization, intellectualism, and consumerism, Inventing Popular Culture presents an engaging assessment of one of the most debated concepts of recent times. Provides a lively and accessible history of the concept of popular culture by one of the leading experts in the field. Traces the invention and reinvention of the concept of popular culture from the eighteenth-century “discovery” of folk culture to contemporary accounts of the cultural impact of globalization. Examines the relationship between the concept of popular culture and key issues in cultural analyses such as hegemony, postmodernism, identity, questions of value, consumerism, and everyday life.

The twentieth century was a period of rapid change for religion. Secularisation resulted in a dramatic fall in church attendance in the West, and the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of new religions including the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), the Church of Scientology, and the Children of God. New religions were regarded with suspicion by society in general and Religious Studies scholars alike until the 1990s, when the emergence of a second generation of 'new new' religions – based on popular cultural forms including films, novels, computer games and comic books – and highly individualistic spiritualities confirmed the utter transformation of the religio-spiritual landscape. Indeed, Scientology and ISKCON appeared almost traditional and conservative when compared to the radically de-institutionalised, eclectic, parodic, fun-loving and experimental fiction-based, invented and hyper-real religions. In this book, scholarly treatments of cutting-edge religious and spiritual trends are brought into conversation with contributions by representatives of Dudeism, the Church of All Worlds, the Temple of the Jedi Order and Tolkien spirituality groups. This book will simultaneously entertain, shock, challenge and delight scholars of religious studies, as well as those with a wider interest in new religious movements.

"The best explanation that I have seen for our distinctive combination of faith, hope and naiveté concerning the governmental process." —Michael Kamman, Washington Post This book makes the provocative case here that America has remained politically stable because the Founding Fathers invented the idea of the American people and used it to impose a government on the new nation. His landmark analysis shows how the notion of popular sovereignty—the unexpected offspring of an older, equally fictional notion, the "divine right of kings"—has worked in our history and remains a political force today.

"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.

This reader is intended as a theoretical, analytical and historical introduction to the study of popular culture within cultural studies. It is divided into seven representative sections. The first six sections each contain a selection of readings from a particular approach to popular culture: culture and civilisation tradition; culturalism; structuralism and post-structuralism; Marxism; feminism; and postmodernism, providing a comprehensive overview and examples of the main theoretical perspectives. The final section contains readings from recent debates within the study of popular culture. Together, these sections chart the theoretical development of the study of popular culture within cultural studies, and provide examples of the analysis of the texts and practices of popular culture within each specific tradition. Each section is introduced, edited and contextualised by John Storey.

This edited collection explores the genesis of scientific conceptions of race and their accompanying impact on the taxonomy of human collections internationally as evidenced in ethnographic museums, world fairs, zoological gardens, international colonial exhibitions and ethnic shows. A deep epistemological change took place in Europe in this domain toward the end of the eighteenth century, producing new scientific representations of race and thereby triggering a radical transformation in the visual economy relating to race and racial representation and its inscription in the body. These practices would play defining roles in shaping public consciousness and the representation of “otherness” in modern societies. The Invention of Race provides contextualization that is often lacking in contemporary discussions on diversity, multiculturalism and race.