<em>Dickens and Mass Culture</em>, by Juliet John

The 1980s?the era of Reagan and Thatcher?produced a renaissance in the study of popular or mass in the universities of the United States and United Kingdom. Though this discovery by intellectuals of the culture of the people was by no means unprecedented (indeed, a key text in the recent renaissance ? Peter Burke's Popular in Early Modern Europe [1978] ?opened with an account of the first modern discovery of popular culture), it stood both as a symptom of our political and cultural situation and as a distinctively new inter pretation of the terrain called variously popular, mass, commercial, or vernacular culture. This interpretation began from an impasse, a sense of an intractable antinomy in cultural criticism. Choosing one's term?mass or popular culture?was choosing a side. In the United Kingdom, the opposition was coded as one between structuralism and culturalism1; in the United States, between the Frankfurt critique of the industry and populism.2 The attempt to transcend these oppositions dominated theoretical, historical, and interpretative arguments. Perhaps the most influential formulations were two essays of 1979?Fredric Jameson's Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture and Stuart Hall's Notes on deconstructing 'the popular'.3 Their central arguments ? that mass cultural artifacts are at one and same time ideological and Utopian, and that popular is neither simply a form of social control nor a form of class expression, but a contested terrain ?are by now commonplace, the opening moves in many recent discussions of popular culture.4 The fixed poles of the late 1970s have lost their magnetic force; few left cultural critics or historians are driven to denounce or celebrate mass culture. No longer are considerations of popular merely occasions for jeremiads on cultural degeneration or for self-conscious cultural slumming. Rather the study of popular culture?understood as that contested terrain structured by the industries, the state cultural apparatuses, and the symbolic forms and practices of the subaltern classes?has become the center of cultural studies generally. In this essay I want to consider the consequences of this shift. Is it simply the establishing of a new academic paradigm, a way of producing new research on formerly despised materials? Does it retain any connection to a wider critique of culture, let alone to a project of cultural reconstruction? Or is it, as skeptics and cynics put it, a way for left academics to find resistance and subversive moments in Dallas and Dynastyl5 What is the relation of this rethinking of mass to

In pre-WWI London, mass-circulation publications like Alfred Harmsworth's Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, and best-selling novels like Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan, epitomized a commercial culture that arose alongside a huge increase in availability of consumer products, and a concomitant expansion of advertising industry to create markets for new goods.(1) Though Habermas implicates commercialization of press in decline of liberal public sphere, Edwardian oppositional groups discovered ways to deploy some of same tactics that made Harmsworth a millionaire in order to unite large publics and support widespread social and political change. Suffragists and radical political groups created discursive spaces outside of dominant public sphere - what I will call spheres[2] - but burgeoning commercial mass culture made these counter-public spheres viable. Commodity ads funded suffrage papers; public spectacles and popular advertising campaigns helped package, publicize, and sell causes like the vote to thousands of women (see Tickner). Anarchists, syndicalists, and socialists also turned to mass-publication strategies to create an alternative press and to reach new followers. As Andreas Huyssen suggests, many early modernist writers and artists responded to aspects of this expanding commodity, culture with antipathy (Huyssen, pt. 1). The Egoist (E) and its predecessors, The Freewoman (FW) and New Freewoman (NFW), would seem to exemplify, type of coterie publication that turned its back on mass audiences and published either for posterity or for what Ezra Pound would call party of intelligence (E2/1/17, 21).(3) These little magazines were arenas for radical political and economic theories, egoistic philosophy affirmed by Dora Marsden, and early work of modernist authors like Pound, Richard Aldington, H. D., F. S. Flint, and T. S. Eliot - all of whom generally appear to affirm high-culture side of Huyssen's great divide.(4) But Huyssen's argument overlooks an important phase of early modernism, one that blurs separation of modernists from avant-gardists by their stances toward mass culture? I wish to explore close, if brief, contact between modern commodity-advertising tactics and modernists who in many ways most upheld a notion of high culture against mass-culture contamination. The counter-public spheres that I will discuss - those of suffragism and of anticapitalist and antistatist political movements - showed these modernists how to adapt mass-advertising tactics to further political and social, rather than explicitly economic, goals. I will argue that writers and editors for The Freewoman/New Freewoman/Egoist were attracted to proliferating types of publicity of an energetic advertising industry, and that they also attempted to adopt mass-advertising tactics - not directly from commercial enterprises of mass-market magazines, but rather via suffrage and anarchist movements - in order to seek out large audiences within prewar London masses. These attempts mark a surprising optimism among modernists about possibility of forming broad-based counter-public spheres in opposition to bourgeois social norms, liberal and statist politics, and, above all for modernist authors, conventional literary taste. I will give an overview of developments in commercial advertising, and how those developments were deployed by suffragists and other political radicals in prewar London. These oppositional movements provided an institutional context for little magazine that began as The Freewoman - a feminist paper - and ended as The Egoist - a primary vehicle for modernist authors. I will then discuss these authors' attempts to forge ties to oppositional movements and to market modernism via institutions and material practices of commercial culture. Avant guerre oppositional groups, like women's suffrage organizations and socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist political movements, were intricately related to mass-advertising and mass-publication techniques, which were enjoying unprecedented success. …

The debate over the influence of American culture upon Europe and the rest of the world is hardly new. Discussions about the cultural effects of video recorders, satellite broadcasting, cable television and their likely content are only the latest episode in a long-running drama in which the young and aggressive culture of America bludgeons the elderly culture of old Europe (or correspondingly overruns and wipes out the quaint but ill-armed ethnic cultures of the less-developed world, dragging the natives from coconuts to Coca-Cola in a generation of identity crisis). But though there has been much written about some aspects of this issue, and most non-Americans who have come into contact with American culture have some awareness of its dimensions, there is also much which remains unclear, and ill- or misunderstood. In this essay two aspects of this large and complex problem will be examined. Firstly, the problem of how the “Americanisation of world culture” has been understood until now will be outlined, by looking at its background in the mass culture critique of the 19th and 20th centuries, with some current notions of what American culture is, and some accounts of how it has been internationalized. My aim in this first section is in particular to try to isolate “American culture” from commercial and industrial culture more generally, for a conflation of these phenomena is widespread and very misleading. Secondly, a normative argument will be outlined from the premises that a “superculture” is indeed developing and that, though it is less threatening than many suspect, it requires a vital measure of resistance if many valuable elements of human experience are not to be relegated to anthropology museums. The central value which will be defended here, however, is not “Europeanism” or “Americanism”, but rather the central liberal virtue of diversity, of which cultural expression is an extremely important form. My attempt to develop a politics of cultural protectionism, then, represents a wish to surpass simplistic rejections of American culture and to come to terms with the confrontation of culture with industrial society itself. This involves going beyond the traditional discussion of culture in one country, however, and trying to extend the mass culture debate to the international arena, where the present debate on this problem is far more complex but often less sophisticated.

If the new criticism established a specific role in American culture for literary analysis, it also provided one of the co-ordinates for a view of the quality and nature of the mass culture of press, radio, cinema and television. Paul Lazarsfeld, a pioneer of the debate on mass culture and its effects, has commented on the fact that the role of mass culture and its relationship to other cultural forces such as those of high culture was a major preoccupation of intellectual life from 1935: ‘In this country we attained a peak of discussions about mass culture between 1935 and 1955’.2 The purpose of this chapter and several of those that follow it is to describe the development of this debate in the work of a number of literary, cultural and sociological investigators of the impact of mass culture on American society. One emphasis will be on the proponents of the conservative critique of mass culture which stressed the low level of aesthetic complexity and intellectual content in mass culture. The work of this group, from T. S. Eliot to Dwight Macdonald, proceeded by a comparative method in which the products of mass culture were evaluated in a balance against those of high or avant-garde culture. The balance invariably tilted in favour of the latter. This conservative critique intersects at a number of points with the Marxist critique of the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse who, in the 1930s, took up residence in the USA as a result of the rise of Nazism.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Modernism and Matricide Susan A. Glenn (bio) Ann Douglas. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. xiii + 483 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $25.00. Philip Furia. Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. vii + 246 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $25.00. In the decade after World War I, writes Ann Douglas, America entered a “post-colonial phase.” It was a time of liberatory struggles, a period of breaking away and killing off, when American moderns, black and white, turned their backs on Anglo/European traditions and “genteel” bourgeois “cultural cowardice” to embrace their own cultural resources, including the heritage of African-American folk and popular art (p. 4). Douglas’s Terrible Honesty sets out to chart “the larger American emancipation” and within it the “African American movement of liberation” (p. 5). New York was the media, music, theater, advertising, artistic, and literary capital of the nation—symbol, mecca, and leading edge of America’s modernist sensibilities. 1 If any one term serves as a metaphor for Manhattan modernism, Ann Douglas argues, it is “Mongrel.” This is what Dorothy Parker (half Jewish and half WASP) had planned to call her never written autobiography; it was also part of the cultural vocabulary of white conservatives who worried about race suicide. Mongrel modernism, an eclectic mix of white and black voices, of mass culture and avant garde literary, social, and artistic criticism, was not just a New York phenomenon, but what Douglas sees as its extremes of commercialism and artistic innovation were, as she puts it, “unimaginable without New York City” (p. 13). Terrible Honesty provides a stunningly erudite, imaginative, and provocative analysis of the mental landscape of urban American modernist culture. Whether one agrees or disagrees with its interpretations, the sheer breadth of its treatment of urban modernism and its ability to synthesize a vast literature on literary and popular culture makes Douglas’s book a work to be reckoned with. The first part of the book analyzes the cultural shifts that gave birth to [End Page 113] modernist culture in America, or what might be called its enabling conditions. In order for the rivers of cultural emancipation to flow as freely as they did, Douglas argues, a powerful obstacle had to be cleared away, if not altogether demolished—the “white middle class matriarch of the recent Victorian past” (p. 6). The matriarchs that exerted such a powerful force as the champions of Anglo-Saxon moralism, piety, sentimentality, sexual repression, and racial exclusivity in mid- and late-Victorian culture were the subject of Douglas’s influential study The Feminization of American Culture (1977). In her new book Douglas instead charts what might be called the modernist masculinization of American culture. For just as in the nineteenth century the Victorian matriarch (or “Titaness,” as Douglas labels her) “successfully attacked the Calvinist patriarchy,” so in the twentieth century the matriarch was “hunted down . . . by the forces of masculinization bound together in a backlash known as modernism” (p. 241). If Douglas admits that the New York moderns “could not altogether sever the umbilical cord” between themselves and the matriarchs of Victorian culture (pp. 7–8), the concept of “matricide” nevertheless shapes the analysis in her book. In a key chapter devoted to this topic, Douglas lays out the dimensions of “maternal rebuke and filial revolt,” where the influence of Titanesses like Emma Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jane Addams, and Carrie Chapman Catt are symbolically exorcised by the rebels. What replaced the moralizing piousness of the matriarchy was an irreverent, “egalitarian popular and mass culture,” steeped in the ethos of what writer Raymond Chandler would call “terrible honesty” (pp. 8, 33). Douglas interprets the concept as the desire to strip away the “deceptive appearances” of modern life and glimpse the sometimes unpleasant underlying realities. The conceptual muse of Douglas’s Terrible Honesty isn’t Raymond Chandler, however, but Sigmund Freud. Douglas is quite sure that “what Freud loathed above all else in American culture was its ‘dominating women’” (p. 134). Like Gertrude Stein and William James, Freud was part of the “off stage” influences on New York’s modernist...

Over the past two decades, modernist periodical studies has gradually expanded its precincts to consider magazines and newspapers well beyond the little magazines and the major book reviews. This coincides with a more general shift in the critical discourse to focus on understanding modernism within its historical moment—both by considering high modernists as consumers and producers of mass and popular culture (Faulkner wrote for Hollywood!) and by studying more closely the responses of mass and popular critics and audiences to high modernist works. The smart magazines in the Smart Set (see George Douglas’s The Smart Magazines, NY: 1991) and critics like H. L. Mencken have been studied as mediators between the “high” and the “low,” while work on literary series such as the Modern Library and Everyman’s Library has shown the fluidity of those aesthetic hierarchies in practice, even if notions of what constituted those boundaries remained fairly well agreed upon in contemporaneous critical rhetoric or in the cultural imagination.The expansion of digital archives of periodicals previously treated as disposable by research libraries has contributed to this scholarly interest in and ability to explore the wider territory of literary production in the early part of the twentieth century. Women’s magazines, regional periodicals, Black newspapers and magazines, and periodicals in languages other than English in particular have finally become internationally available and profoundly searchable. Digital humanities projects are underway and are frequently open access; just one example of this is the exciting new Circulating American Magazines website, which aggregates and digitizes data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation from 1919 through 1972, enabling comparisons of the circulation patterns of a wide range of periodicals during the modernist era.1Rachael Alexander’s Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s contributes to this body of work through a comparative study of two North American women’s magazines with similar names and similar missions, but whose divergent advertising and editorial contents signal significant differences in the imagined readerships, and therefore in national imaginaries, across the border. Alexander finds that both the Ladies Home Journal in the United States and Canadian Home Journal in Canada imagine their audiences as white women, middle-class or middle-class-aspiring, and both frame their contents as aiding their readers in becoming more ideal women and patriots. These similarities belie the ways that the two publications define nearly all of the above terms differently, sometimes even radically so; the LHJ sees femininity as ideally domestic but also as suburban and more inclined toward “increased glamour, luxury and leisure time” than the CHJ, which targets a more rural audience and tempers its proconsumerist stance with an emphasis on “nature and the natural, practicality and thrift” (90). The two magazines, she argues, both emphasize self-improvement through “character and appearance,” but with subtly different, nationally-inflected “negotiations and constructions” (91). These differences ultimately lead Alexander to conclude that while the two take the same form they must be understood as belonging to two “distinct—but not unrelated—genres” (194): the American women’s magazine and the Canadian women’s magazine. Such a distinction, Alexander argues, is difficult to discern outside of her unique comparative approach, but it is important both because it allows her to counter tendencies to subordinate and subsume Canadian print culture to US print culture and because it facilitates more careful readings and cross-disciplinary treatments of these titles in particular, and by extension, of mass-market magazines more generally.Alexander rightly identifies one of the major hurdles to a comparative approach: the sheer amount of material periodicals scholars must process to achieve a substantive account of just one title, much less more than one. But this, of course, is the particular joy and richness of periodical studies, and it is easy to detect Alexander’s intellectual excitement about the multifarious forms contained in both the LHJ and the CHJ. Alexander manages her materials deftly, balancing astute readings of editorials on the duties of a housewife and the morality of fashion and cosmetics with discussions of dressmaking patterns, cover images, and a quantitative analysis of the advertising content of both magazines throughout the decade. From the start, Alexander asserts her commitment to performing close and surface readings that allow a tracing, for example, of the “ways in which notions of the natural and the artificial were being remade in the context of modernity” (187).At the same time, her analysis is informed by significant historical and theoretical accounts of the burgeoning twentieth-century culture of consumption, the concomitant emergence of a so-called “middle class” in both the United States and Canada, and the complex relationship between “mass” and “popular” cultures in the modernist era. Thus framed, Alexander’s study does a lovely job of demonstrating the ways these two magazines are essential case studies for the complex cultural scenes in Canada and the United States in the 1920s. Her conclusion concisely lays out the significance of the preceding analysis for modernist periodical studies:Alexander underscores the fact that LHJ and CHJ editorials frequently contradicted the advertisements that accompanied them on facing pages or in adjacent columns—or even other editorial content or fiction offerings appearing in the same issue—and asserts that this is not a flaw of the form. While she makes passing reference to Caroline Levine’s notion of “affordances” here (191), Alexander explicitly states in her introduction that she is not inclined to reconstruct the readership of either title she examines. Instead she centers her claims on the ways the magazines themselves are imagining their readers, as consumers, housewives, women, and citizens. The implication, then, seems to be that the multiple and sometimes contradictory messages are a hallmark of individual magazines’ attempts to be relevant to a wide audience, and that the “affordances” function for editorial staff rather than audiences. This producer orientation also suits Alexander’s characterization of the magazines as artifacts of a “proto-mass culture” as Michael Kammen describes it in American Culture, American Tastes (1999). In this work, Kammen narrates a gradual and uneven shift from the dominance of “popular culture” (which he characterizes as participatory and local) to “mass culture” (generally passive and privatized) through a period of “proto-mass culture” during the interwar years. As mass-market magazines, Alexander explains, the LHJ and CHJ are fundamentally “middlebrow” because they play a “dual role of encouraging a burgeoning consumer culture and promoting self-improvement” (49).But is that all that is meant by “middlebrow”? How, or is, that concept related to class formations? If the LHJ and the CHJ appeal to “middlebrow” audiences, is that because they themselves are “middlebrow” texts, or does “middlebrow” define readerly orientations? Alexander’s discussion of middlebrow culture relies heavily on Joan Shelley Rubin’s magisterial The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), which is of course a foundational text in the field, and mentions in passing Janice Radway’s equally foundational A Feeling for Books (1997), but there is a surprising lack of engagement with more recent historical and theoretical work on the middlebrow. Aside from Rubin’s own 2013 collection, Cultural Considerations, Imagining Gender might have benefitted from dialogue with the work of Beth Driscoll (particularly “The Middlebrow Family Resemblance” [2016]); the essays in Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (ed. Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith [2003]); Jaime Harker’s America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars (2007); the work of Nicola Humble (particularly The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s–1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism [2011]); or Melissa Sullivan and Sophie Blanch’s special issue of Modernist Cultures on “The Middlebrow—With or Without Modernism” (2011). Much of this recent work engages with reception studies approaches to suggest that the “middlebrow” is as much a function of readerly orientation as it is of authorial or editorial intentions. Taken together, this body of work points the way to a broad conception of the middlebrow that is about both forms and practices.From this perspective, one might acknowledge the multiple and sometimes contradictory representations of, for example, femininity or domesticity within one issue of a periodical in order to note that the magazine form actually allows readers to “choose their own adventure” by selectively reading or skipping or skimming the multiple offerings in any given issue. If, as Alexander suggests in her analysis, the representations of “nation” and “citizenship” are consistent throughout the magazine, as opposed to those of femininity or domesticity, this reader-centric approach would actually reinforce her argument about the relative commitment to cultural nationalism in these two magazines. Femininity might be in flux, the “middlebrow” under contestation, but there is perhaps more at stake in pinning down “Canadian-ness” than “American-ness.” Must “affordances” be available to readers in some categories to enable the codification of other identities? Even without determining precisely “who” the readers “actually were,” such possibilities could be considered. This would also enable the potential further investigations Alexander suggests in her conclusion, which might query how readers who were not the white, middle-class or middle-class aspiring women being “imagined” as ideal audiences by the LHJ and CHJ writers, editors, and advertising agents might have used, remixed, or come to terms with the ideals presented to them in the magazines’ pages.Alexander closes with Patrick Collier’s 2015 assertion, published in this journal, that “the periodical is valuable simply because it exists—because it once performed some desirable functions for some number of people.”2 Imagining Gender is an ambitious, and ultimately quite successful, accounting of two periodicals whose circulation and longevity suggest that they clearly did perform desirable functions for their readers, which may—or may not—have been consistent with the functions their creators had in mind. Alexander’s multilayered approach offers a salient model for comparative periodicals study going forward, and reminds us that the Canadian periodical was much more than a derivative of its US counterpart.

My discussion turns on two terms which, to this point at least, I have refrained from either defining with any precision or relating to each other: ‘mass culture’ and ‘public sphere’. The latter term in particular has become associated with the name of Jürgen Habermas. His book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), addresses the crisis of ‘public opinion’ in post-liberal capitalism. It also constructs a distinctive historical narrative about the decay of the public sphere and the rise of mass culture which has become the focus of considerable debate.1 Habermas’s views on mass culture are clearly influenced by Frankfurt School figures such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, but in a general way they also echo the views of more conservative English modernists such as Eliot and Leavis. I want to treat Habermas as an exemplary modernist here, and to test his narrative of the rise and decline of public culture against the case of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines 1885–1918

Zora Neale Hurston's known historical antagonism for commercialized folk music has implications for current understanding of Hurston's idea of folk and their tall tales, signified in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston writes: Everybody indulged in talk. He [the mule] was next to Mayor in prominence, and made better (50). character Janie, who loved conversation and sometimes thought up good stories on mule in an independent spirit that leads her into conflict with her husband mayor, Joe Starks (50-51), allegorizes Hurston's own need to oppose apparently monological discourse of commercialized forms of popular culture. In this manner Hurston's art reminds us of oppositional relation between some modernisms and their sometime Other, cultural commodity (Huyssen 21). Her known differences with left revolutionary politics of era in which her major novel was published diminish somewhat when one takes stock of common cultural enemy for African American intellectuals as divergent as W.E.B. Du Bois and Hurston, who shared a desire to articulate a sense of African American dignity in midst of a dominant social order offering through imposition of color line numerous oppressive indignities, including a variety of ways of caricaturing African Americans and their culture through new technology of media. As Hazel Carby notes, Hurston's 1934 essay Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals posits idea of inauthenticity of commercial culture's representation of African American culture in race records (31). One implication of Hurston's situating rural folk against mass culture is that literary and historical meaning of talk--both tall tales told on porch of Joe Starks's store in Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Florida porch she mentions in her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks in Road (46-47)--should then be understood in relation to its mass cultural other, revived blackface minstrelsy and popular music gaining prominence in form of sheet music and new medium of radio. If talk in Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God makes town's `talkers the center of world (60), one might well ask what assumed place of imagined cultural center until talking began. Hurston was concerned to establish authenticity in representation of popular forms of folk culture and to expose disregard for aesthetics of that culture through inappropriate forms of representation ... people she wanted to represent she defined as a rural folk, and she measured them and their cultural forms against an urban, mass culture. (Carby 31) Yet this urban, mass culture was itself often devoted to a certain nostalgia for rural culture of folk. Like Jean Toomer, a figure prominent in early stages of Harlem Renaissance who greatly admired folk music of south and lamented how black folk were taking to commercial music rather than to their own musical traditions, Hurston, emergent toward end of Renaissance, was a partisan in culture wars dividing respective identities of city and country. As Carby says, The of a discourse of `folk' as a rural people in Hurston's work in twenties and thirties displaces migration of black people to cities (31). Thus Hurston herself was drawn into some of dehistoricizing practices of culture industry that she attempted to exorcise. Carby's critique, one reminiscent of Alain Locke's historic criticisms of Hurston's dependence on stock formulas for her characters (Lott 236), foregrounds author's creation of a folk who are outside of history (Carby 32). Yet according to Robert Hemenway's characterization of her literary strategy, Hurston's purportedly extra-historical was a narrative fiction defined more specifically as adversarial to the racist stereotype of folk experience in American minstrel tradition and historical neglect of folk arts by black people themselves (ZNH 52). …

Book Reviews The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills. By Judith A. Adams. Boston: Twayne (G. K. Hall), 1991. Pp. xvi + 225; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $27.95 (cloth); $11.95 (paper). Judith Adams has written the most definitive condensed history of the amusement park industry in the United States to date. Drawing on a wide interdisciplinary and business literature, The American Amusement Park Industry surveys the history of this mass-cultural form from its 19th-century origins through its late-20th-century inter­ nationalized and corporate structures. In the process, this volume brings together bibliographical, economic, and case-study materials hard to find elsewhere. It constitutes an important handbook and source for anyone interested in the history of entertainment and mass culture. Adams finds the industry’s beginnings entwined in trolley parks, pleasure gardens, exhibitions, and fairs and locates its major defining innovations in the early Coney Island and the World’s Columbian Exposition. This part of the history has been told before, and more provocatively, by, for example, Robert Rydell in his work on world’s fairs and John Kasson in Amusing the Million, a meditation on the relationship between Coney Island and the 20th-century middle class. Similarly, Adams’s chapters on the Disney empire rehearse arguments made more cogently by Richard Schickel and Michael Wallace. Nevertheless, she breaks new ground by tracing the turn-of-thecentury rise and the Great Depression decline of the hundreds of smaller urban amusement parks developed by big industrialists and petty entrepreneurs to divert the working class. Both the Depression and the rise of automobile ownership, Adams argues, were responsi­ ble for the shakeout of the old parks and paved the way for the exurban conglomerate chains of parks that sprang up, following Disney’s lead, in the boom economy of the 1960s. Adams illustrates the process of dissolution, reorganization, and conglomeration with case studies, drawing a picture of the mixed industry of the 1990s— dominated at the top by nearly twenty corporately owned chain theme parks, planned on the basis of market research and located close to main currents of mass tourism. In the same industry (if not the same market), dozens of amusement parks from the 19th-century urban tradition still persist, with much smaller audiences, ad budgets, and admission prices. Permission to reprint a review from this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 797 798 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Adams argues that amusement and theme parks have been sites where Americans have celebrated and learned to understand tech­ nology and machinery, through encounters with the Ferris wheel, the incline railroad, electricity, and other wonders. It was often in the parks, she argues, that new technologies were visible and available to masses of ordinary people. According to this line of thought, parks were both ritual forms that promoted new ideas and discoveries and the means by which Americans came to terms with those discoveries. She also shows that the parks were not fully possible without techno­ logical expansion and change. For example, street railway companies built parks and initiated the pattern of resort trips by large numbers of city and suburb dwellers. When autos replaced streetcars, the lure of the amusement park was replaced by the call of auto touring, but eventually the hypercity and the superhighway made the theme park and its mass audience possible. This chain of events is plausible, but one is left wondering if the question “why theme parks?” is not being asked in the wrong way. Clearly, technology helps make theme parks possible, but what makes them necessary and desirable? One way to answer this question is to posit that amusement and theme parks answer some deep psychic and cultural needs on the part of the American people, and Adams resorts to this argument, as have many other commentators on the industry. A trip to Disneyland may function as a sacred pilgrimage, but theme parks also fill needs for their producers, developers, and promoters. The 1980s explosion of investment in these carefully researched and highly controlled “leisure destinations” is part of an intensification of the exploitation of leisure by conglomerate corporations. The biggest theme parks...

At the core of what we know as popular culture studies today is the work of scholars associated with or influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Popular culture itself and intellectual interest in its risks and possibilities, however, long predate this moment. Earlier in the 20th century, members of the Frankfurt School took an active interest in what was then referred to as “mass culture” or the culture industry. Semiotics, emerging in the latter half of the 20th century as an exciting new methodology of cultural analysis, turned to popular culture for many of its objects as it redefined textuality, reading, and meaning. The works of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco are exemplary in this regard. The work of the Birmingham school, also known as British cultural studies, drew from both of these intellectual traditions but went on to forge its own unique methods drawing on Marxist and poststructuralist theoretical legacies. Quickly spreading across the Anglophone world, Cultural Studies is now widely recognized, if not as a discipline proper, as a distinctive branch of the humanities. Other methodologies contemporaneous with this trend are also now clubbed together as part of this generalized practice of cultural studies. Important among these are feminist approaches to popular culture exemplified by work on Hollywood cinema and women’s melodrama in particular, the study of images and representations through a mass communications approach, and ethnographic studies of readers of popular romances and television audiences. A minor, theoretically weak tradition of popular culture studies initiated by Ray Browne parallelly in the Unites States may also be mentioned. More recently, Slavoj Zizek has introduced startlingly new ways of drawing popular cultural texts into philosophical debates. If all of these can be taken together as constituting what is generally referred to as popular culture studies today, it is still limited to the 20th century. Apart from the Frankfurt School and semiotics, British cultural studies also counts among the precursors it had to settle scores with, the tradition of cultural criticism in Britain that Matthew Arnold and in his wake F. R. Leavis undertook as they sought to insulate “the best of what was thought and said” from the debasing influence of the commercial press and mass culture in general. But the history of popular culture as an object of investigation and social concern goes further back still to the 18th and 19th centuries, the period of the rise and spread of mass literature, boosted by the rise of a working-class readership.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, LAWRENCE LEVINE--esteemed cultural historian and winner of MacArthur genius fellowship--described his colleagues' nervous laughter when he classified certain popular entertainers as great artists. Levine asked himself why it mattered so much to distinguish between and and he set out to discover when the categories crystallized in the United States and whose interests they served. The result was Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book zeroes in on mid-nineteenth-century phrenology, which measured cranial dimensions to establish hierarchy of racial types, from the high brows of European Caucasians to the low brows of alien races: Coombs' Popular Phrenology of 186s typically illustrated the domed forehead of Shakespeare against the flat-headed skull of A Cannibal New Zealand Chief (Levine 222). As the century wore on, that distinction was increasingly wielded by class of old stock Anglo-American gentlemen who sought to shore up their privilege in the face of threats posed by galloping immigration, industrialization, and technology. Levine closely documents how this class succeeded in fissuring what had been a rich shared public culture, removing Shakespeare, symphonic music, opera, and the fine arts to pantheon of inaccessible high culture (9). Other scholars of the late-nineteenth-century U. S.--such as Ellen Gruber Garvey, Kathy Peiss, and Richard Ohmann--have traced parallel power relations in struggles between established middle--class book publishers and the makers of mass magazines, in the gendered division of commercialized leisure, and in the commodification of audiences by advertisers. 'The eastern establishment sought both to distance itself from and to control this new mass culture marketplace, and new class alignment--sometimes named the professional-managerial class--emerged. Repeatedly, the cultural categories which crystallized in this period--highbrow/lowbrow, literary/commercial, elite/mass, serious/popular--served to widen the gap between us and them. In period which saw the collapse of Radical Reconstruction, the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, the violent suppression of labour action, and the first wave of women publicly agitating for suffrage, these categories did crucial cultural work. They naturalized the hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and their divisions underwrote other forms of segregation. Some, of course, refused such distinctions and their own relegation within the cultural hierarchy. S. Alice Callahan (Muskogee)--currently identified as the first Native American woman to publish novel, Wynema (1891)-used the popular sentimentalism associated with white middleclass women to launch an excoriating attack on the genocidal policies and practices of the government of the day. In the same period, African-Americans across the country did an end-run on the white monopoly on publishing and distribution, seizing the new tools of mass publishing for their own ends. The Colored Cooperative Publishing Company in Boston, James McGirt in Philadelphia, and Sutton Griggs in Tennessee all produced and marketed popular magazines and books to Black communities, heroizing African-American and mixed-race figures and raging, in their various ways, against racial inequities. Along the fault lines and colour lines of cultural hierarchy, such creative forces marshaled solidarity and resistance. What has all this, an argument from U.S. studies, to do with our position as academics, in Canada, right now? Ohmann argues that mass culture emerged hand in hand with the modern research university, each shaping and serving the other. To simplify his argument: the new universities trained the professional--managerial class which shaped and consumed the new commercial culture which, in turn, helped corporate capitalism to find stability in the economic chaos of the post-bellum U. …

The theory of mass culture--or mass audience culture, commercial culture, popular culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known--has always tended to define its object against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this opposition. As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror-images, and are essentially staged in terms of value. Thus the familiar motif of elitism argues for the priority of mass culture on the grounds of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; the pursuit of high or hermetic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small groups of intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this essentially negative position has little theoretical content but clearly responds to a deeply rooted conviction in American radicalism and articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an establishment phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institutions, in particular with the university. The value invoked is therefore a social one: it would be preferable to deal with tv programs, The Godfather, orJaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or HenryJames, because the former clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider strata of the population than what is socially represented by intellectuals. Radicals are however also intellectuals, so that this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip; meanwhile it overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally not revolutionary) stance of much of the most important forms of modem art; finally, it offers no method for reading even those cultural objects it valorizes and has had little of interest to say about their content.

Camp Modernism Introduction Marsha Bryant (bio) and Douglas Mao (bio) What’s perhaps most remarkable about extant scholarship touching on camp and modernism is that it so rarely focuses explicitly on their intersection. Discussing the postwar fate of the avant-garde in Five Faces of Modernity a few decades ago, Matei Calinescu disparaged camp for cultivating “bad taste—usually the bad taste of yesterday—as a form of superior refinement”; in Epistemology of the Closet some years later, Eve Sedgwick would observe that a “gay male rehabilitation of the sentimental” had “been in progress for close to a century under different names, including that of ‘camp.’”1 More recently, Dennis Denisoff has offered a substantial demonstration of how camp sustained “aestheticism’s political utility into the twentieth century,” while Christopher Nealon has illuminated the “camp messianism” of recent “post-Language” poetry.2 Scholars have also shown how camp’s accoutrements were taken up by protomodernist and modernist figures from Whitman, Wilde, James, and Beerbohm to Pound, Stein, H. D., and Proust.3 And in Modernism/modernity itself, we find Wendy Moffat pairing Forster and Liberace, Pamela Caughie pondering Sandra Bernhard in an analysis of passing, David Boxwell exploring drag performances in British army camps, and Sam See bringing camp and queerness to bear on Darwin and Woolf. Wide-ranging and ravissant as this body of work has been, however, few scholars have devoted substantial attention to camp’s relation to modernism so named.4 In this journal, camp has graced a title only once, in a review of Pamela Robertson’s revelatory Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Nor does a larger survey of the secondary literature [End Page 1] uncover much. A sweep for couplings of “camp” and “modernism” in the MLA International Bibliography yields but one source that actually places the terms in relation, a 1996 essay by Peter Horne. Perhaps the most pointed recent treatment of modernist camp appears in Nick Salvato’s Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (2010), which advocates viewing high modernist closet dramas through the lens of camp as “affectively ambivalent queer parody” (180). Yet even this incitement occupies only a few pages of Salvato’s monograph (180–83).5 In our view, more scholarly attention is due the camp-modernism nexus for a host of reasons. At the level of the particular, we note that the cultural scene we claim as scholars of modernism includes not just the literary icons already named but Josephine Baker, Josef von Sternberg, Cecil Beaton, and Cecil B. DeMille. Our forum accordingly constellates an array of costumes, criticism, little magazines, museums, novels, objects, paintings, performances, photographs, and social networks that speak to some of camp’s many dances with modernism. There are also more general affinities that solicit attention, among which we would mention five. First, there can be neither camp nor modernism without someone’s going over the top. Daniel Albright has memorably defined modernism as a “testing of the limits of aesthetic construction,” an art of extremes; doing camp means overdoing it, pushing the limits of good taste, soliciting a verdict of outrageousness.6 In camp as in modernism, critical evaluation involves distinguishing successful excess from excess that fails, and in both, such judgments often hinge on how gender is constructed or construed. Second, both camp and modernism enjoy complex relationships to popular culture, which scholars have replotted in recent years. Revisiting the vexed figure of “mass culture as woman” (Andreas Huyssen), scholarship in both areas has rightly called into question gendered hierarchies between the individual and the masses, high and low culture, and hard and soft art.7 Juan A. Suárez’s account of “pop modernism,” for example, explodes the old opposition between high modernism and “the promiscuous, pop-oriented avant-gardes” powered by kitsch and consumer culture, including “the popular gay idiom of camp” (Pop Modernism, 2, 193). As David Bergman notes, the claim that camp “exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture, or consumerist culture” raises issues of power, privilege, and identity that remain generatively contested.8 Similar complications arise when one tries to extricate cultural work from working it—which leads to our third...