Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay by Katherine Roeder (review)

Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism By Joshua Yumibe Rutgers University Press, 2012 230 pp./$72.00 (hb), $29.95 (sb) Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity By Lauren Rabinovitz Columbia University Press, 2012 256 pp./$82.50 (hb), $27.50 (sb) Oftentimes the study of earl silent cinema is more akin to archeology than it IS to traditional modes of cinema studies. Most (roughly eighty percent) of the films of the era are gone; many primary records have long been destroyed. What remains for researchers are fragments, traces, and gleanings from other media. It is not surprising, then that historians and cultural critics have still only scratched the surface of both the cinema and other popular entertainments of the turn of the last century: a lot of deep digging and careful piece work is required. Two new books, Mating Color: Early Film, Mass. Culture, Modernism and Electric. Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity, are vital contributions to our understanding or the American cultural landscape a century ago. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At first glance, they are concerned with disparate subjects the use of color in early silent film and the relationship between early cinema and amusement parks but, both are ultimately about the complex connections between silent film, popular culture, technology., and questions of modernity. Joshua Yumibe's Moving Color explores the use of applied color techniques hand coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning) in silent film. Yumibe frames his subject with considerations of changes in color theory and beliefs about the nature of visual perception in the nineteenth century and with a broader look at the increasing prevalence of color in daily life in advertising, postcards, wallpaper, etc.) Thanks to technological and chemical improvements. He positions color cinema as part of a larger popular assimilation of color in society cinema, and especially color cinema, was an acclimatizing agent to the rapid transformations wrought on society by modernism, whether it be a new sense of urban spaces, growing understandings of the body as a gendered and sexual site, or new moral and behavioral codes. Yurnibe intertwines these social and cultural consequences of color cinema and other concomitant popular entertainments.) With impressive research into the history and technology of these varied color processes. He explores not only how they were used, but why they were used--again, drawing upon newly developed nineteenth-century ideas about color theory, psychological and therapeutic uses of color, and color as a tool for moral uplift. …

Reviewed by: Dickens and Mass Culture Elaine Freedgood (bio) Dickens and Mass Culture, by Juliet John; pp. xi + 321. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, £50.00, $99.00. Charles Dickens, Disney, Barbie, Madonna: in Dickens and Mass Culture, Juliet John presents us with a crackling continuum of cultural entrepreneurs and many questions about branding, commercial culture, mass reading publics, and celebrity. Dickens and Mass Culture also makes me wonder what "Dickens" meant and what he (or it) means to those of us who have read lots of him and to those of us who know his work at a remove. His celebrity—his brand, if you will (and I don't know that I will)—makes questions about reading, literacy, and knowledge resonate from the nineteenth century, when poor readers largely had access to Dickens through plagiarisms like Oliver Twiss (1841) and non-readers could listen to Dickens read aloud by their employers, tavern-keepers, or tea-shop owners, to the present, when non-readers can rent Oliver! (1968) from Netflix, watch the Masterpiece Theater Our Mutual Friend (1999), or visit Dickens World. What is Dickens? Dickens and Mass Culture asks this question in terms of print, public readings, film, the theme park, and the market. The title of this book is confusing, even misleading. Although Dickens used the words "mass" and "masses," he didn't use the phrase "mass culture" because "mass" used as an adjective—as in mass appeal, hysteria, propaganda, and public—is a twentieth-century formulation. John's smoothing over of this problem suggests an alternate title: "Dickens himself uses the terms 'mass' and 'masses' prominently in his early writings on America, and on his first visit to the States, he is centrally concerned with mass culture understood as commercial market-driven culture" (76). Dickens and Commercial Culture would have been a better title for this book, as it better identifies Dickens's concern; Dickens is a possible avatar of Barbie, then, but not of Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer. Indeed, Victorian culture becomes "massified," to use Sally Ledger's terminology from Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination ([Cambridge, 2007] 143), but there are continuing tensions and efforts associated with defining and categorizing popular, radical, and elegant entertainments, literary and otherwise. In Ledger's book, which one cannot help comparing to Dickens and Mass Culture, she works through these categories, carefully delineating the audiences, effects, and changes occurring in the middle of the century and placing Dickens in a rich historical context of radical publishing. John, on the other hand, gives us Dickens almost entirely in his own words, which are treated as though they are transparent. His varying feelings toward his readers, auditors, and other consumers of his work in plagiarized and popularized forms lead John to describe Dickens as at one and the same time utopian and commercial, humanitarian and profit-driven, charitable and misanthropic. A new kind of celebrity, he had to learn how to deal with the mob, the crowd, and the public, as he variously experienced his loving readers; in John's description of his responses, his values clash, collide, and otherwise behave like errant motor vehicles. But these contradictory feelings are not analyzed in any rigorous way. The worst mob was in America, where Dickens found his fans so suffocating that he had to retreat to Harvard and the "enlightened" company of its faculty (86). American fans instigated in Dickens a "repressed, subterranean rage against the kind of mass culture [he] perceived there and a yearning for a culture that somehow transcends the market" (87). This description is odd since John gives us plenty of evidence that Dickens repressed very little of his rage against mass culture; it may also be that his rage against [End Page 378] American culture was connected to the fact that he was not collecting royalties there. To see the floods of fans and then receive money for his readings, but not for his texts, must have been painful to a man whom John represents as enamored of money in a physical way: Dickens wrote, "the manager is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like a sofa-cushion, but...

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...

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.

Taking as its point of departure the contested claim that Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment conceptualizes a differentiated form of aesthetic reason, this essay explicates key properties of aesthetic rationality as it later was elaborated in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. With these properties in view, it next compares modern artworks and film and discovers that aesthetic reason has taken up residence in mass culture. Adorno's confinement of aesthetic reason to modern art, and his insistence with Horkheimer that modern art and the rationality it entails are emasculated by mass culture, appear premature. As the host for aesthetic rationality, mass culture secures the rational content of modernity against the hegemony of instrumental reason. Through the increasing universalization of mass culture aesthetic reason achieves universality, placing us on the threshold of another enlightenment, an aesthetic enlightenment that would be the completion of modernity's as yet unfinished project.

Reviewed by: Cultura de masas, reforma y nacionalismo en Chile 1910-1931 J. Pablo Silva Cultura de masas, reforma y nacionalismo en Chile 1910-1931. By Stefan Rinke. Santiago: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, 2002. Pp. 174. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. This collection of essays is the fruit of tremendous research. Stefan Rinke has reviewed a wide range of primary and secondary sources in order to compile what he calls "a first approximation and basic information" on the topic of "sociocultural change in Chile" (p. 30). Most scholars of Chile would agree with him that nationalism, reform, and mass culture were all central elements of the sociocultural change that took place from 1910 to 1931. And Rinke does an effective job of summarizing the key events and intellectual currents in these three fields. Indeed, the book is filled with interesting observations and anecdotes and draws effectively on the existing literature. But the book coyly refuses to draw the separate threads together and reach a new synthesis. As his title implies, the work is divided into three parts with two essays each on mass culture, reform, and nationalism. The first essay is a somewhat scattered review of different facets of urban life including media, consumption, popular entertainment, and construction and urban planning. The second essay provides a fascinating overview of movies and the movie business in Chile. This chapter offers the book's most original contributions and to my knowledge represents the most accessible and thorough statement on the topic. In Part II, the book presents a chapter on employer paternalism and employee resistance in the mining sector, followed by a chapter on urban reform movements including the women's movement, temperance movement, and movements for health and sanitation. In the last part of the book, Rinke has a chapter on the competing intellectual discourses on Chilean identity and another chapter on economic nationalism. Although these essays on nationalism draw heavily on earlier works, they do offer a systematic comparison of the different intellectual currents that made up the debate over Chilean nationalism at the time. Overall, Rinke's message seems to be that in this period Chilean modernist ambitions did not play out in the way that intellectuals and politicians had hoped. Beyond that, Rinke seems content to provide a set of parallel narratives. Within these narratives he amasses a lot of interesting detail, and future students of Chilean nationalism and movie culture would do well to start with those chapters of this book. But [End Page 174] given Rinke's obvious mastery of the material, one could have hoped for a bit more. Although I was willing to believe that all these narratives were interrelated and mutually reinforcing, I would have appreciated some specifics on the relations between the different spheres of nationalism, social reform, and mass culture. Rinke could have clarified his own position by more clearly situating himself within debates in the secondary literature. J. Pablo Silva Grinnell College Grinnell, Iowa Copyright © 2006 Academy of American Franciscan History

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Angela Miller. Review of "Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay" by Katherine Roeder.

Plastic Madonnas, packaged holy tours, and biblical theme parks can arouse discomfort, laughter, and even revulsion in religious believers and nonbelievers alike. Scholars, too, often see the intermingling of religion and commerce as a corruption of true spirituality. Suzanne K. Kaufman challenges these assumptions in her examination of the Lourdes pilgrimage in late nineteenth-century France.Consuming Visions offers new ways to interpret material forms of worship, female piety, and modern commercial culture. Kaufman argues that the melding of traditional pilgrimage activities with a newly developing mass culture produced fresh expressions of popular faith. For the devout women of humble origins who flocked to the shrine, this intensely exciting commercialized worship offered unprecedented opportunities to connect with the sacred and express their faith in God.New devotional activities at Lourdes transformed the act of pilgrimage: the train became a moving chapel, and popular entertainments such as wax museums offered vivid recreations of visionary events. Using the press and the strategies of a new advertising industry to bring a mass audience to Lourdes, Church authorities remade centuries-old practices of miraculous healing into a modern public spectacle. These innovations made Lourdes one of the most visited holy sites in Catholic Europe.Yet mass pilgrimage also created problems. The development of Lourdes, while making religious practice more democratically accessible, touched off fierce conflicts over the rituals and entertainments provided by the shrine. These conflicts between believers and secularists played out in press scandals across the European continent. By taking the shrine seriously as a site of mass culture, Kaufman not only breaks down the opposition between sacred and profane but also deepens our understanding of commercialized religion as a fundamental feature of modernity itself.

The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East, edited by Hala Auji, Raphael Cormack and Alaaeldin Mahmoud

Research Article| June 01 2000 “Chaos Invading Concept”: Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture Paige Reynolds Paige Reynolds Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2000) 46 (2): 238–268. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-3004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paige Reynolds; “Chaos Invading Concept”: Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2000; 46 (2): 238–268. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-3004 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

From its inception Modernism defined itself - and has been defined - by its relationship to mass culture. Aesthetic autonomy, the Modernist ideology that defined art as separate from culture, was a project that emerged unevenly and across most industrializing nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The distinction between art and mass culture was central to artistic debates over Modernism in Great Britain, and offers an illuminating case study to be pursued within this chapter. Britain experienced rapid industrialization and new media as forces that exaggerated and simultaneously disrupted established class hierarchies. Modernist artists articulated their differences from mass culture to understand and explain themselves as a culturally distinct movement; critics of the period invoked these differences to justify their status as experts prepared to enlighten an under-informed public about Modernism's high purpose; and in recent decades a new generation of critics of British Modernism has distanced itself from artists' and critics' earlier claims of difference from mass culture by depicting Modernism and mass culture as historically related and dialectically interdependent. But whether critics articulate Modernism as separated by a "great divide" from mass culture or as mutually constitutive, they agree that one of the foundational contexts for understanding Modernism is its relationship to mass culture.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Coney Island was the uncontested epicenter of America's emerging mass culture. It was the quintessential American resort: the birthplace of the amusement park, the hot dog, and the roller coaster. Its history is one of breathtaking transformation and re-invention. Celebrated for its glittering amusement parks and its enormous crowds, it was in times past a mecca of grand hotels, race tracks, beer gardens, gambling dens, concert saloons, and dance halls. A new mass culture began to take shape there. Its harshest critics decried it as Bedlam by the Sea, but others deemed it a necessary outlet for the masses where the democratic spirit was granted free rein. Despite its precipitous decline, Coney Island remains a metaphor for the American amusement industry and the hundreds of honky-tonk resorts and amusement parks it has spawned. Coney Island: The People's Playground is the first new history of Coney Island in almost half a century, tracing its evolution and cultural impact as an amusement center from its earliest development as a seaside resort to the present day Mermaid Parade. Presented in a photodocumentary format featuring more than one hundred vintage photos, archival material, personal accounts, and contemporary sources, the book evokes the atmosphere of the resort as experienced by those who visited it during its heyday. Through the reminiscences of nineteenth and twentieth century writers, literary figures, and amusement historians, Michael Immerso traces Coney Island's remarkable evolution and subsequent decline, while at the same time examining the remarkable individuals and complex social forces that contributed to its rise and fall. Coney Island is not merely a documentary of the amusement industry or the story of a fabled amusement park, but rather a narrative of the way Americans, and particularly immigrants and urban Americans, came to regard the pursuit of leisure as part of their national birthright.

Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture Aaron Lecklider. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.Although the use of the term dates back to the 1950s, the negotiation of what Lecklider calls in the US has existed since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. On one hand, there are intellectual elites such as writers, journalists, scholars, and others with formal education who often account for a large part of the upper and upper middle class. On the other hand, there are those who are frequently categorized as working class laborers and are not engaged in intellectual work. The sheer number of these laborers is large, despite their limited socioeconomic impact. Lecklider argues that the rise of mass culture and waves of social transformation helped the eggheads lose their control over cultural productions as the masses increasingly determined how a culture would develop. Consequently, the brainpower of the non-elites started to overpower that of those who were considered to be out of touch with reality. In Inventing the Egghead, Lecklider examines the history of American popular and mass culture in the twentieth century to chronicle how this negotiation occurred and how traditional intellectual minorities-working class Americans, women, racial minorities, and others -acquired intellectual authority.The author uses the term to refer to intelligence that empowered ordinary Americans who did not have access to formal higher education. Brainpower challenged existing social and political hierarchical structures and oftentimes led to their demise. This shift occurred when popular and mass culture, and not formal educational and political institutions, became the means of sharing knowledge. From Coney Island to Albert Einstein, the array of evidence the book provides is broad. For example, Luna Park at Coney Island was where tens of thousands of people, if not more, gathered for both simple and educational amusement. Early in the twentieth century, intellectual experiences at an amusement park did not top formal intellectualism. However, the fact that ordinary citizens could obtain education and intellectual experiences through mass popular culture signaled the egghead negotiation which was to come during the following century. For example, even though many intellectuals at the time were confused by intricate works by Einstein, Lecklider argues that he simultaneously gave a sense of hope to many Americans that perhaps one day they would become intellectuals like himself. In other words, Einstein embodied the negotiation between the intellectual elites and non-elites, enemies and friends, and fear for and the fascination of the unknown. …

Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within and outside of monasteries across the region—in Nepal, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia’s culture of Buddhist leisure—what he calls “socially disengaged Buddhism”—through a study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement parks, and other sites. In conversation with noted theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure, and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate how “secular” and “religious,” “public” and “private,” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan’s Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Suối Tien Amusement Park in Saigon, and Shi Fa Zhao’s multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and sectarian developments. They present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a movement. Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way. Parks and museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global economic conditions, and visitors. Architects must often compromise and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their buildings will develop lives of their own. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks readers to question the very category of “religious” architecture. It challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.