History of popular culture  

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Popular culture at Jahsonic.com

Popular culture is the culture of the common people or in other words: mainstream culture or just culture. It is a result of the influences of "low" culture and "high" culture.

The growth of modern industry in the 19th century led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. Increased literacy, rapid printing, cheap paper, music halls gave rise to popular culture as we know it today.

The culture of the common people outside of large urban areas and/or in pre-industrial times is referred to as folk culture, rather than popular culture.

Contents

Ancient popular culture

"panem et circenses", literally "bread and circuses"


18th and 19th century popular culture

The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization in many Western countries and the rise of new great cities in Europe, America, Australia and other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas and from poor to rich nations. Increased literacy, improvements in education and public health, new industrial and scientific technology and rapidly increasing urbanisation provided the socio-economic bases of popular culture as we know it today.

Developments in transport also played a vital role in this process, with the advent of the steam locomotive and the steamship enabling both cultural products and their performers, producers and consumers to be distributed further, faster and more widely than ever before. Related advances in building technology saw the construction of the first large-scale public exhibition spaces (e.g. the Crystal Palace) and ground-breaking public events such as the famous Great Exhibition of 1851.

During the late 18th and 19th centuries, entirely new genres of popular culture arose from the many new forms of communication that appeared and proliferated. These include the illustrated newspaper and magazine, the novel, printed sheet music, political pamphlets, the postcard, the greeting card, children's books, commercial catalogues, photography and the phonograph.

Developments in the print industry during the 19th century — notably the advent of the illustrated newspapers and the periodical magazine — led to the appearance of many new genres of text-based popular culture, including the detective story, the serialised novel (e.g. Charles Dickens and the pioneering science fiction of authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells), as well as the mass-market populist book genre nicknamed the "Penny Dreadful", which later evolved into the pulp fiction genre. These innovations also created new categories of work and employment, such as the commercial artist, the journalist and the photographer.

Facilitated by law reform and changes in social attitudes, newspapers and periodicals began to feature new forms of social reportage and commentary, such as the editorial, the gossip column and the first works of investigative journalism. The invention of the telegraph allowed newspapers to gather news and other information more rapidly and widely than ever before, enabling the rise of the daily newspaper and the news agency.

The performing arts likewise underwent radical changes in this period, with the emergence of many new genres including modern grand opera, comic opera and operetta, vaudeville and music hall entertainment. The invention of gaslighting revolutionised the theatre and made regular night-time mass entertainment a practical reality.

Music, at all levels of culture, was also drastically reshaped by new technology and techniques: the mass-production of musical instruments such as the guitar, the banjo, the ukelele, the harmonica and the pianoforte (soon followed by the player piano and reproducing piano); the invention of the saxophone; the evolution of the symphony orchestra; the standardisation of concert pitch; and the advent of cheap printed sheet music.

The two most profoundly influential developments in this entire period were without doubt the invention of the collodion 'wet-plate' process of photography in 1851 and the invention of the phonograph ca. 1878. Printing, photography and recorded sound provided the practical basis for a significant part of popular culture in the 20th century.

20th century popular culture

20th century popular culture

In modern urban mass societies, popular culture has been crucially shaped by the development of industrial mass production, the introduction of new technolgies of sound and image broadcasting and recording, and the growth of mass media industries -- the film, broadcast radio and television, and the book publishing industries, as well as the print and electronic news media.

But popular culture cannot be described as just the aggregate product of those industries; instead, it is the result of a continuing interactions between those industries and those who consume their products. Bennett (1980, p.153-218) distinguishes between 'primary' and 'secondary' popular culture, the first being mass product and the second being local re-production.

Popular culture is constantly changing and is specific to place and time. It forms currents and eddies, in the sense that a small group of people will have a strong interest in an area of which the mainstream popular culture is only partially aware; thus, for example, the electro-pop group Kraftwerk has "impinged on mainstream popular culture to the extent that they have been referenced in The Simpsons and Father Ted."

Items of popular culture most typically appeal to a broad spectrum of the public. Some argue that broad-appeal items dominate popular culture because profit-making companies that produce and sell items of popular culture attempt to maximize their profits by emphasizing broadly appealing items. (see culture industry)

The invention of popular culture by John Mullan

The invention of popular culture by John Mullan

Quotes from an article by John Mullan first published in The Guardian in 2000.

Perhaps there has always been popular culture. Preserved in the amber of high literature and art are the traces of the lower amusements of the past. Look into Shakespeare, Hogarth or Dickens and you can see the remnants of popular diversions: ballads and songs, fairs and pantomimes, sports and ingenious forms of cruelty to animals. Yet the idea that 'the common people' might have a culture (rather than just habits of rowdyism) dates from precisely the time when our idea of high culture was being invented. Popular culture has always been its ill-mannered twin.

The 18th century first saw the development of a culture that was available to anyone prepared to buy a ticket. Before this, the aristocracy had kept all that was best in culture for itself. Now culture was there to enrich and fill the time of the newly affluent, and genteel consumers could polish themselves by visiting art galleries or museums, attending concerts or performances of Shakespeare. As pleasure became 'culture', it became increasingly important for the polite classes (many of them nouveaux riches) to distinguish between high and low entertainments. Then, as now, those most insecure about their own refinement were likeliest to be most hostile to all that might be thought 'low' or 'vulgar' (until the mid-19th century the words most commonly used for what we might call 'popular').

--John Mullan, [1]

Popular Culture and High Culture (1974) - Herbert J. Gans

Popular Culture and High Culture: an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste

The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture - Robert Warshow

The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (1962) is a collection of essays by Robert Warshow. It is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine. It is a precursor to Cultural Studies. Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life reminiscent of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays--notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and the pieces on the New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and the Rosenberg letters are considered classics. The most recent edition, prefaced by Stanley Cavell, includes essays not previously published --on Kafka and Hemingway--as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe.

Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club - Bernard Gendron

Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club - Bernard Gendron

Medieval Popular Culture : Problems of Belief and Perception (1990)

Medieval Popular Culture : Problems of Belief and Perception (1990) by Aron Gurevich, Peter Burke, Ruth Finnegan

Synopsis By scrutinizing the lives of saints, miracle stories, descriptions of fantastic travels, penitential literature, catechisms and similar genres, from the fifth to the 15th centuries, the author attempts to reconstruct the beliefs and perceptions of ordinary men and women in medieval times.

See also: Middle Ages - popular culture

The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1998)

- Patrick Brantlinger

Patrick Brantlinger's 1998 work, The Reading Lesson, is a valuable study of 19th-century elitist attitudes toward mass literacy. As Brantlinger reminds us, the reading of popular Victorian novels was viewed as "vampiric" and "addictive." Too much reading was an impediment to living; books and the fantasies they inspired ill-prepared their readers for real life.

By the late 19th century, and into the 20th, many Anglophone intellectuals had come to hate the "masses" who by then were dominating cultural life. The critic John Carey has documented this hostility among a generation of British (and Irish) writers, including Wells, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence, all of whom fantasized the destruction of this dangerous class. Yeats hoped the masses would all perish in a great war against the better classes; Lawrence wished for their extermination in a great chamber "as big as the Crystal Palace." Indeed, many such authors didn't want a mass readership at all, because it would have threatened their lofty status; the heart of literary modernism involves a balance of writerly "difficulty" intended to dissuade a mass readership, with a penchant for creating popular notoriety. The point was to appeal to the emerging middlebrow public, which was founding its cultural aspirations on the Book-of-the-Month-Club version of the elitist reading list. --Charles Paul Freund via http://www.reason.com/links/links072204.shtml [Nov 2005] literature - UK - 1800s

CAPs: New Grub Street, Oliver Twist, Lady Audley, Poor Jane, Vanity Fair (more)

Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (1986) - Iain Chambers

Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience (1986) - Iain Chambers





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