Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization

Inventing Popular Culture is a lively and accessible history of the idea of popular culture by one of the leading experts in the field. Written from the critical perspective of cultural studies, the book 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. Inventing Popular Culture argues that the idea of popular culture is an invention of intellectuals. The book does not present an analysis of particular texts and activities which have been, or could be defined as, popular culture; instead it explores the changing intellectual ways of constructing texts and activities as popular culture and how these intellectual discourses articulate questions of culture and power. Examining 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, Inventing Popular Culture presents an engaging assessment of one of the most debated concepts of recent times.

Preface. 1. Popular Culture as Folk Culture:. Nature and Nationalism. Pastoral Life as Primitive Culture. Music Hall and the Masses. Imagining the Past to Make the Present. Notes. 2. Popular Culture as Mass Culture:. Culture Against Anarchy. The Culture of Hyperdemocracy. The Marxist Masses. Ways of Seeing Other People as Masses. Notes. 3. Popular Culture as the ‘Other’ of High Culture:. The Making of High Culture. The Modernist Revolution. The Politics of Cultural Exclusion. Culture and Class. Notes. 4. Popular as an Arena of Hegemony:. Hegemony: From Marxism to Cultural Studies. Wandering from the Path of Righteousness. Side Saddle on the Golden Calf. An Inclusive Media and Cultural Studies. Notes. 5. Popular Culture as Postmodern Culture:. The New Sensibility. Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine: The Postmodern Condition. Back to the Future: Opera Postmodern. Notes. 6. Popular Culture as the ‘Roots’ and ‘Routes’ of Cultural Identities:. Postmodern Identities. The Roots of Cultural Identities. The Routes of Cultural Identities. Mixing Memory and Desire: Dusty Springfield and ‘The Land of Love’. Coda: Performing Identities. Notes. 7. Popular Culture as Popular Art:. Cultural Power. When Gravity Fails: An Aesthetics of Popular Culture?. Beyond Aesthetic Essentialism. Notes. 8. Popular Culture as Global Culture:. Globalisation. Trading Commodities in the American Global Village. The ‘Local’ as the New Folk Culture. Notes. References. Index.

John Storey is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. His publications include Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods (1996), What is Cultural Studies?: A Reader (1996), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (second edition, 1998), Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life (1999), and Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (third edition, 2001).

“John Storey′s lively and provocative history of popular culture is interwoven with a characteristically clear and intelligent critique of the politics of its operation. Storey remains one of the most lucid and readable writers to be found in cultural studies, and this is a wonderfully tight, punchy, and illuminating book.” Graeme Turner, University of Queensland “Storey accomplishes something truly unprecedented in this book as he traces the evolution of the idea of popular culture. His cogent analyses of the key polemics are compelling because they demonstrate so vividly why we still need cultural studies, if for no other reason than to better understand how intellectuals imagine ordinary people.” Jim Collins, University of Notre Dame "An excellent resource for academic libraries; as an introduction to cultural studies, this is hard to beat." Library Journal