History of popular culture  

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 +[[Image:The Smoker by Joos van Craesbeeckjpg.jpg|200px|thumb|right|''[[The Smoker]]'' (ca. 1654 - 1662) by [[Joos van Craesbeeck]]]]
{{Template}} {{Template}}
-[[Popular culture at Jahsonic.com]]+:''[[popular culture studies]], [[everyday]], [[body genre]]s, [[Alltagsgeschichte]] ''
-[[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]].+[[Popular culture]] is the culture of the [[common people]] or in other words: [[mainstream culture]] or plainly [[culture]]. It is a result of the influences of [["low" culture]] (that of [[working class culture]]) and [["high" culture]] (of the [[nobility]]).
-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 hall]]s gave rise to popular culture as we know it today.+The [[industrialization|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 hall]]s 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. 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.
== Ancient popular culture == == Ancient popular culture ==
- +:''[[Greco-Roman mythology]]''
"[[panem et circenses]]", literally "[[bread and circuses]]" "[[panem et circenses]]", literally "[[bread and circuses]]"
 +
 +== Middle Ages ==
 +:''[[Medieval popular culture]]''
 +== Renaissance ==
 +:''[[Renaissance erotica]], [[Renaissance culture]], [[Medieval and Renaissance bestsellers]]''
 +
 +By the time of the [[Renaissance]], the [[narrative culture|narrative]] and [[visual culture]] (in short [[popular culture]]) at hand to the Renaissance [[everyman]] encompassed [[European folklore]], [[fable]]s, [[biblical history]] or [[Christian mythology]], [[classical mythology]] and the [[Founding of Rome|founding myth of Rome]].
 +
 +These tropes were spread via the [[printing press]] and [[master print]]s.
==18th and 19th century popular culture== ==18th and 19th century popular culture==
 +:''[[18th century culture]], [[19th century culture]]''
The growth of [[industrial revolution|modern industry]] from the late [[18th century]] onward led to massive [[urbanization]] in many Western countries and the rise of new great [[city|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. The growth of [[industrial revolution|modern industry]] from the late [[18th century]] onward led to massive [[urbanization]] in many Western countries and the rise of new great [[city|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.
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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]]. 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.+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 [[gaslight]] 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. 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.+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 society|mass societies]], popular culture has been crucially shaped by+:''[[20th century culture]]''
 +In modern urban [[mass society|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 industry|film]], [[broadcasting|broadcast]] [[radio]] and [[television]], and the book [[publishing]] industries, as well as the print and electronic [[news media]]. 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 industry|film]], [[broadcasting|broadcast]] [[radio]] and [[television]], and the book [[publishing]] industries, as well as the print and electronic [[news media]].
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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]]) 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]])
- +== See also==
- +*[[History of culture]]
-== The invention of popular culture by John Mullan==+*[[Popular culture]]
- +*[[History of erotica]]
- +*[[History of horror]]
-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. --[[John Mullan]], http://www.guardian.co.uk/dumb/story/0,7369,387444,00.html [2004]+== Bibliography ==
- +*''[[The invention of popular culture]]'' by ''[[John Mullan]]''
-18th Century [...]+*''[[Popular Culture and High Culture: an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste]]''
-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, http://www.guardian.co.uk/dumb/story/0,7369,387444,00.html [Jun 2004]+*''[[The Immediate Experience|The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture]]'' ([[1962]]) by [[Robert Warshow]]
- +*''[[Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club]]'' - [[Bernard Gendron]]
-When culture can be bought and sold, taste becomes an increasingly useful social marker. It was commerce that gave 'culture' to the middle classes, but commerce could also sully it. So the Georgians set about building a national culture - from the plays of Shakespeare to the music of Handel - that only the qualified could properly enjoy. As this culture widened, paradoxically the separation of high and low ('polite' and 'vulgar') sharpened. -- John Mullan [...]+*''[[Medieval Popular Culture : Problems of Belief and Perception]]'' (1990) by Aron Gurevich, [[Peter Burke]], Ruth Finnegan
- +*''[[The Reading Lesson]]'' by [[Patrick Brantlinger]]
- +*''[[Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience]]'' (1986) - [[Iain Chambers]]
-== Popular Culture and High Culture (1974) - Herbert J. Gans ==+
-:''[[Popular Culture and High Culture: an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste]]''+
-zon.com+
- +
-== 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 - [[Robert Warshow]] +
- +
-This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings 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 classics, once frequently anthologized but now hard to find. Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell, The Immediate Experience includes several essays not previously published in the book--on Kafka and Hemingway--as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe. "A legendary little book, partly because its author died at the age of 37, but mostly because it stands as a virtually unique representative from its period of a consistently open-minded, moral, aesthetic, and political engagement with commercial culture." --Louis Menand+
- +
-== Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club - Bernard Gendron ==+
- +
- +
-[[Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club]] - [[Bernard Gendron]]+
- +
-Gendron (philosophy, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Technology and the Human Condition) here traces the interaction between "high" and "low" culture specifically, between modernist visual art and popular music from the cabarets of Paris's Montmartre district in the 1880s through New York City's "art after midnight" clubs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In scrupulously documented detail, he examines the development of the elite/mass, art/pop dialectic within its social and historical context in the 20th century, such as the metamorphosis of jazz from Dixieland into bebop, incorporating modernist postures, and the metamorphosis of rock from the Beatles into punk and new wave, aided and abetted by Warhol and Waring. With unprecedented depth, detail, and dedication, Gendron illustrates how jazz and rock, once considered banal entertainment, came to be validated as art forms. The author's language and references to Foucault, Lyotard, and Adorno will make this book useful for all academic libraries, though it will be an especially valuable addition to popular culture collections. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.+
- +
-"Punk was always the intellectuals' favorite," says Bernard Gendron, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "Academics were interested in punk from the start, in England especially. One of the first really classic texts in cultural studies from the early 1980s was Dick Hebdige's Subculture, which stressed the semiotics of punk -- trying to read the 'live' texts of punk clothing's signifiers, for example. In the United States, it was the art world that was really taken with punk." Mr. Gendron traces the movement's ambivalent relationship with high culture (and vice versa) in his recent book, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press). -- Scott McLee+
-Medieval Popular Culture : Problems of Belief and Perception (1990) - Various authors+
- +
- +
-== 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. --Via Amazon.co.uk+
- +
-Peter Burke (born 1937) is a British historian. He received his doctorate from Oxford University. For sixteen years he was part of the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex, before moving to the University of Cambridge where he still holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College. Burke is celebrated as a historian not only of the early modern era, but one who emphasizes the relevance of social and cultural history to present-day issues. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Burke [Oct 2005]+
- +
-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 +
{{GFDL}} {{GFDL}}

Revision as of 11:16, 6 October 2013

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Popular culture is the culture of the common people or in other words: mainstream culture or plainly culture. It is a result of the influences of "low" culture (that of working class culture) and "high" culture (of the nobility).

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

Greco-Roman mythology

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

Middle Ages

Medieval popular culture

Renaissance

Renaissance erotica, Renaissance culture, Medieval and Renaissance bestsellers

By the time of the Renaissance, the narrative and visual culture (in short popular culture) at hand to the Renaissance everyman encompassed European folklore, fables, biblical history or Christian mythology, classical mythology and the founding myth of Rome.

These tropes were spread via the printing press and master prints.


18th and 19th century popular culture

18th century culture, 19th century 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 gaslight 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 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)

See also

Bibliography





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "History of popular culture" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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