Emergence Of Mass Culture Research Articles

Mass culture and its determinants

Methodological ambiguity of researchers' positions leads to the fact that mass culture is referred to different aspects of the phenomenon. In addition, it is rapidly transforming, acquiring new facets and properties within specific socio-cultural systems. The article shows that certain socio-cultural changes that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led to the emergence of mass culture in Western civilization, as a result of the formation of mass and mass consciousness. Under the mass should be understood not only the degree of distribution of the product (a large number of something), and above all the focus on widespread consumption and low moral and aesthetic level of the product (including works of art).

Jews, Mobility, and Sex: Popular Entertainment between Budapest, Vienna, and New York around 1900

AbstractThis article investigates the coinciding of the mass migration from Europe to the Americas and the emergence of mass culture, two developments that shaped everyday life, popular entertainment, and Jewish and non-Jewish relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Jewish actors and actresses were among the most prominent performers who staged in Orpheums, Varietés, and vaudevilles on both sides of the Atlantic. In their performances they drew on the notion of a new quality of mobility that society was experiencing, utilizing it to negotiate issues such as of the cultural construction of identities and Jewishness, or to critically reexamine antisemitic and nationalistic attitudes. On the one hand, mobility enabled negotiations of controversial issues. On the other hand, mobility led to accusations against popular entertainment, both legitimate and erroneous—for example, that vaudevilles functioned as covers for clandestine prostitution. Therefore, the article examines the question of how mobility influenced popular culture. What were the controversial issues that mobility raised, and what accusations did these evoke? In what ways did actors and actresses in popular culture address gender and Jewishness? To answer these questions, the article analyzes the spaces of popular entertainment in Budapest, Vienna, and New York through close examinations of newspapers, manuscripts, playbills, and records of censorship.

Analysis of the evolution of culture

The paper is devoted to the analysis of determinants and sources of culture. If earlier certain cultural values have not changed for many centuries, determining the existence of more than one generation, now several cultural eras alternate throughout one life. The transition to a post-industrial society leads to a transformation in the spiritual sphere and the emergence of mass culture. It is shown that the starting point for the philosophical reflection of mass culture should be beyond the consideration of this phenomenon only as a phenomenon of artistic life of "people of mass culture" and the definition of its conditionality from the development of culture of society as a whole.

Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture by Rob King

Reviewed by: Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture by Rob King Henry Jenkins (bio) Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture by Rob King. University of California Press. 2017. $34.95 paperback; open-access e-book available. 253 pages. James Agee summed up a whole tradition of thinking about American film comedy in his influential essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era” when he asserted, “The only thing wrong with screen comedy today is that it takes place on a screen which talks.”1 Agee’s assertion defined how sound-era screen clowning has been discussed, much as the essay established the canon of silent comedians deemed worthy of studying. Gerald Mast’s The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies preserves the idea of a breach between silent and sound comedy, shifting from a focus on silent clowns to screwball comedy with the entry of talking pictures, a move that oversimplifies the history of both subgenres.2 Continuing a project begun with his own earlier book The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, Rob King’s Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture seeks to reassess the historical evolution of screen slapstick, here digging deeper into what happened as this comic tradition entered the sound era.3 In the process, King provides a rich illustration of how to bring a deeper historical understanding to an essential film genre. Agee, Mast, and Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clown represents the masterpiece tradition at work, writing a history focused on exceptional works by essential artists, largely isolated from larger developments in [End Page 187] the genre, leaving aside the film industry or a broader mediascape.4 King’s approach is thoroughly revisionist, a genre history as grounded in the archive and the trade press as it is in the screening room, one that seeks to dramatically expand which films matter. His primary contribution here involves a recentering of the history of sound shorts, which have received very limited attention compared to what has been written about the silent shorts of Mack Sennett and Hal Roach. To do so, he has to reconstruct the industrial history of 1930s short-film production, including some rich material on the ways shorts were being positioned as a desirable alternative for audiences apt to be too weary to watch double features. He traces key producers, including Earle W. Hammons’s Educational Pictures and the Jules White unit at Columbia, as they seek to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. Well-known performers such as Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges are discussed at some length here, but so are those less likely to be recalled today, such as Andy Clyde or Clark and McCullough. King is attentive to the discourses that framed these shorts and, in particular, the responses of exhibitors in the trade press that offer an indication of regional and class divides in terms of what forms of comedy proved desirable. Here, he does identify some signs that slapstick bore a “stigma” during the early sound period. As one critic recalled, “Sound came along and out went the pies.”5 The book’s opening paragraph also signals a shift in the meaning of the word “hokum” during this period. A New York Times reporter notes with surprise that a piece of stage slang which originally meant surefire material now more often referred to “hooey, tripe, apple-sauce, blah and bologna.”6 The instability in how slapstick was read during this transitional period remains a core concern across the book. King shows the continued popularity of slapstick across the decade, especially outside of the major metropolitan areas. King draws on Raymond Williams’s model of cultural dynamism (of emergent, dominant, residual, and archaic cultural practices) and Pierre Bourdieu’s field of production models to account for several shifts in the status of slapstick across the 1930s.7 As King explains, these comic shorts emerged from “a sui generis network of interpersonal, professional and institutional relations radiating out of the studio gates into the fields of vaudeville, burlesque, circus and even literary humor within which hierarchies of comedic value...

Transnational Intellectuals

The purpose of this article here is to consider the two-ways street opened by the experience of the mass culture. What happens when European writers visit the “margins”? What happens when they are face to face with the peripheral audiences? I’ll try to answer this question in the frame of a condition of World Literature: the emergence of mass culture. The industry of distinguished visitors had a series of emblematic moments in Argentina and Brazil in the early twentieth century. Those are the years of the “democratization” of the countries, the pick of the immigration processes and the emergence of mass culture.

Grabiński popularny?

Grabiński popular ?AbstractThe article discusses the so far not researched aspect of Stefan Grabiński’s work, i.e. the relationship between the texts of the author of Demon ruchu [The Motion Demon] with the popular fiction that was flourishing at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and during the Interwar Period. Grabiński seems to be fascinated with these narratives and very often uses tricks, clichés or stereotypes that appear in the mass literature of that period, and he also uses certain “popular” plot schemes. The analysis of his works from the point of view of their relationship with this type of literature is also an excuse to reflect about the issue of relationship between literary circuits and the emergence of mass culture, and is an attempt to break out of the circle of previous interpretation

1960-е и развитие массовой культуры: заметки о советском варианте модерности

In her essay, Zinaida Vasilyeva engages in polemics with Mark Lipovetsky. Her major argument consists of three points: first, she disagrees that the abbreviation "ITR" correctly describes the discourse and culture analyzed in Lipovetsky's article. In the Soviet context, this abbreviation could have signified a highly qualified engineer, as well as a middle-level technician or a qualified and experienced worker. She thinks that the discourse described by Lipovetsky is a general enlightenment (progressors') discourse of the scholarly and technical intelligentsia ( nauchno-tekhnicheskaia intel -ligentsia ). ITRs and NTIs are not synonymous. Moreover, engineers and scientists (representing hard sciences) did not compose a community with a shared culture and discourse. This was true from neither the emic nor the etic point of view. Their worlds were divided by strict administrative and symbolic boundaries. Vasilyeva suggests that the very attempt to contrast the "engineer discourse" with some "humanities" discourse preserves traces of the old competition between Soviet elite groups. In her view, the examples discussed by Lipovetsky do not prove the existence of the ITR discourse. Instead, they document a controversial and problematic discourse about the modernity of the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia. This discourse focused on issues such as industrialization, the emergence of mass culture, the technocratic elite, and so on. Vasilyeva's second point of criticism is directed at the ITR culture/discourse which, she claims, characterizes a highly diverse mass of Soviet consumers of culture, including an average representative of the humani­ties. She interprets the emergence of such mass cultural consumption in the postwar USSR as a sign of the development of modern society, when the change of the urban social-demographic landscape was accompanied by the appearance of new identities and cultural models. While Vasilyeva agrees that representatives of technical professions composed the major­ity of the population with higher education - that is, of the Soviet middle class - she insists that this Soviet intelligentsia of the epoch of the 1960s represented a generational cohort rather than a professional group. Institutes of higher education and new industrial enterprises served as their spaces of socialization where they could set up clubs, youth theaters and other groups of interests, and develop and test new behavioral and cultural models and discourses. For the intelligentsia of the 1960s, generational networking played such a crucial role because of their "social orphanhood": their fathers perished during World War II or lagged behind their children in terms of education. As a social phenomenon, the postwar generation left behind their parents and thus could not rely on traditional family examples and models. Vasilyeva finds examples of their new Soviet subjectivities in movies by the director Marlen Khutsiev, whose protagonists are very Soviet yet also very modern. New gender roles were also tested in the movies of the 1960s. Vasilyeva refutes Lipovetsky's view on the role of women in the ITR culture ("obedient lover or 'war bride'") with examples of female protagonists in Mikhail Romm's "Nine Days of One Year", and in Khutsiev's "The Il'ich Gate," and "July Rain." Finally, Vasilyeva turns to progressors' ideology and essentialism as features of the ITR discourse. She sees the former as an enlightenment project that displays nothing specifically Soviet. Moreover, didacticism characterized not only the technical but also the humanitarian elites who associated themselves with the prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia and regarded themselves as the bulwark of "true Russian culture." Already in the nineteenth century, "romantic anti-capitalism" and rejection of the European-type social-economic transformations was bringing together left and right, radical and conservative intellectual traditions that shared the ideal of Russia's "special path." Vasilyeva contends that essentialism is endemic to almost all Russian intellectual trends. Lipovetsky's concept of the ITR community, in her view, is construed in the same essentialist mode.

<i>The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture</i>, and: <i>Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, and: Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood Paul Monticone (bio) Rob King . The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 376 pp. $26.95 (paper), $60.00 (cloth). Mark Garrett Cooper . Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 264 pp. $27.00 (paper). Two recent studio histories provide valuable contributions to our understanding of the emergence of studio-era Hollywood and revivify a genre of film history still—long after the so-called historical turn—too thick with annotated filmographies, biographical chronicles, and narrow industrial histories. The significance of the 1910s to the shape that popular cinema would take has long been known, and among the decade's most significant innovations were the emergence of the feature-length film, the studio system's hierarchical division of labor, the star system, the acceptance of cinema as a legitimate cultural form, and the victory of southern California over other production centers. At first glance, the subjects of Rob King's The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) and of Mark Garrett Cooper's Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (University of Illinois Press, 2010) would appear to reside outside the industry's mainstream. But in accounting for practices seemingly out of step with much of the industry, both books advance our understanding of how that mainstream formed. By the midteens, mainstream cinema had largely abandoned the working-class and immigrant audiences of the nickelodeon era and had excluded women of the nickelodeon era and had excluded women from positions of authority. However, as these two books establish, at Keystone and Universal such configurations did exist—at least for a time. Both books share a similar structure: six chapters in two sections, the first accounting for the presence of unrefined, working-class cultural forms and female directors, and the second charting how these studios came into alignment with the rest of the industry. In neither case is this latter process construed as a simple surrender to an exogenous dominant, and this is the principal virtue shared by both volumes. For King, the transformation of [End Page 61] Keystone's brand of slapstick from a popular entertainment to mass culture required complex hybridizations of cultural forms, and, for Cooper, the fortunes of female filmmakers were determined by complex institutional practices, such as the geography of the workplace, management hierarchies, and the function genre would perform in feature production. The tight focus shared by the two works—each treats one studio and covers about half a decade—permits the authors to demonstrate how two particular features of mainstream cinema were instituted at two particular studios. King's The Fun Factory argues that Keystone should not be recalled nostalgically for its pratfalls and bathing beauties but, rather, should be understood as instrumental to the early twentieth century's most significant cultural shift, from a "hierarchical cultural order that reinforced social divisions to a commercially driven 'mass' culture that tended to obscure those divisions" (8). Keystone, at first, exploited those divisions, as King demonstrates in his first chapters. Shortly after its founding in 1912, Mack Sennett's Keystone found a niche as a working-class reply to the uplift movement's genteel pretensions (like those of Sennett's former employer, Biograph). Moral melodramas were countered with slapstick spectacles that often dismissed narrative development and frequently burlesqued the conventions of Griffith's last-minute rescues. The second chapter traces how, at Keystone, humor initially centered on ethnic stereotypes of Germans, Irish, and Jews (all staples of nineteenth-century popular entertainments), but these images were supplanted by classed figures, such as Chaplin's paradigmatic tramp, as immigrant and native-born workers began to forge a common, working-class identity. Pushing ethnic humor to the margins also helped expand Keystone's audience into the middle class. Paradoxically, at the moment when Keystone most clearly foregrounded class as comedic content, it also began to modify the working class's popular...

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (review)

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (review)

Speciesism, Part III: Neoteny and the Politics of Life

Speciesism, Part III:Neoteny and the Politics of Life Thomas Lamarre (bio) In part one of this series, drawing on Sergei Eisenstein and Ōtsuka Eiji, I called attention to the "plasmaticity" of animation, which becomes pronounced in animated characters. Implicit in my emphasis on plasmaticity was a move away from representation theory and the politics of representation.1 If we look at wartime animation only in terms of what it represents, we quickly reach an impasse. We might say, for instance, that pigs in Norakuro represent the Chinese, or the jungle critters in Momotarō: Umi no shinpei (1945, Momotarō's divine navy) represent inhabitants of the islands of (what the Japanese at the time referred to as) the Southern Seas. Yet even the context of Norakuro and Momotarō, where the references appear more stable than in Tezuka's Chōjin taikei (1971-75, Birdman anthology) or Janguru taitei (1951-54, Jungle emperor), the power of these animations does not come primarily from representation. The materiality of the medium or media is integral to the actual experience and impact of speciesism, that is, of the transformation of "peoples" into nonhuman animal species. Among the examples of speciesism explored thus far, it is clear that different media present a distinctive set of material orientations. There is, of course, overlap between different media in terms of their material [End Page 110] orientations, which allows for translation across media, not only at the level of narrative devices or generic conventions. Nonetheless, if we are to grasp something of the specificity of manga and animation, materially and experientially, we need to consider some basic differences. Numa Shōzō's Kachikujin Yapū (The domesticated people Yapoo; also translated as "Yapoo, the Human Cattle" on the book cover) novels foreground textual techniques and discursive strategies of instrumentalization: the encyclopedic and clinical presentation of cruel, painful techniques for reengineering Yapū bodies for various uses frequently overwhelms the events that compose the story. Pierre Boulle's novel La planète des singes (1963, Planet of the Apes) uses a venerable literary device: two space travelers find a message in a bottle in which a human recounts his journey to a planet on which monkeys (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans), not humans, are the intelligent species; as it turns out, however, the two space travelers reading the story are chimpanzees and find the story shocking and incredible. In other words, the novel plays with the absence of images to encourage us to assume that the readers are human, which device is designed to shock our assumptions about the primacy and universality of the human species. Speciesism in film will draw on other kinds of material orientation. In the Planet of the Apes films and Star Trek series, for instance, makeup plays a crucial role, and sometimes animatronics or models are used for special effects. This is often the case with speciesism in live-action cinema, with digital effects and digital animation in recent years gradually supplanting and recoding earlier "species effects." Manga and manga films present yet another set of material orientations. The Life of Characters In the formation of a specific set of manga and animation orientations, the 1920s and 1930s are particularly important, and those orientations continue to affect animation and manga today. In Japan, as in other parts of the world, the emergence of mass culture in the 1920s brought with it a new sense of distinct markets and audiences. This era saw, for instance, the mass production of a set of cultural materials for women (women's journals and other female-directed commodities),2 as well as the mass production of a children's culture, with new journals and books intended for children, which would increasingly include manga.3 This process was not merely a matter of discovering and developing new markets or niche audiences but of actively isolating and shaping them, economically, legally, and politically. As early as the Film [End Page 111] Laws of 1917, for instance, the Japanese government displayed a concern for segregating audiences by gender (mandating separate seating for men and women), and, as film become associated in the popular imagination with juvenile delinquency, particularly in the course of the 1920s, children...

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (review)

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (review)

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture

The fun factory: the Keystone Film Company and the emergence of mass culture

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: SATIRE IN OVERALLS: THE KEYSTONE FILM COMPANY AND POPULAR CULTURE 1. The Fun Factory: Class, Comedy, and Popular Culture, 1912-1914 2. Funny Germans and Funny Drunks: Clowns, Class, and Ethnicity at Keystone, 1913-1915 3. The Impossible Attained! Tillie's Punctured Romance and the Challenge of Feature-Length Slapstick, 1914-1915 PART II: MORE CLEVER AND LESS VULGAR: THE KEYSTONE FILM COMPANY AND MASS CULTURE 4. Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes: Keystone, the Triangle Film Corporation, and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture, 1915-1917 5. Uproarious Inventions: Keystone, Modernity, and the Machine, 1915-1917 6. From Diving Venus to Bathing Beauties: Reification and Feminine Spectacle, 1916-1917 Conclusion Notes Filmography Index

Theatrical reform and the emergence of mass culture in Spain

The early twentieth century in Spain saw a series of initiatives designed to reform the institutions of the theatre (and musical theatre in particular), prompted by the desire to regenerate politics and society following defeat in the Spanish-American War. This desire for regeneration had an unintended effect: while regeneration was supposed to make Spanish institutions more responsive to the populace, theatre shifted away from its traditional position in Spanish popular culture and became an elite institution; this in turn made room for new forms of popular culture such as cinema, cabaret and sporting events to flourish. Government-mandated reforms tended to alienate popular audiences by not taking their demands into account. Formalized copyright control only protected elite, conservatory-trained theatrical composers and not artists working in popular entertainment. Ironically, these reforms – designed to save Spanish theatre from a decline into frivolity and meaninglessness – ended up marginalizing the theatre and legitimizing popular entertainment.

British Encounters with American Art

The Ashcan School paintings discussed in Douglas Tallack’s Urban Visual Culture course at the University of Nottingham were, for me, the hook. I was enthralled by the way that my growing knowledge of the history of chaotic, cosmopolitan, early-twentieth-century New York opened up the complex legibility of these works. Coming to American studies after having previously read English and philosophy, I was surprised to be spending my time looking at art. However, while researching my thesis (“On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism”), as a Terra summer residency fellow, and in my postdoctoral career, I have sought to catch up on both art history practice and the history of American art. I now teach in the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham, where I offer courses entitled The Emergence of Mass Culture and American Realisms. My journey, from novice to teacher—or novice teacher—in less than a decade represents a fairly intense encounter with American art. But it also suggests a trajectory, from initial fascination to a more informed engagement, relevant to encounters of other kinds. At Nottingham, visual art forms one element of our interdisciplinary Thought and Culture survey and is also taught in specialist options, such as those named above and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s course African American Visual Culture. Both approaches are used at other U.K. American studies undergraduate programs: at the University of Leicester, painting and photography are discussed in courses exploring the City and the West; at King’s College London, Shamoon Zamir leads secondand final-year options titled Visual Culture: An Introduction and Photography USA; and at the University of Winchester, Carol Smith asks the students who take her Picturing a Nation course to reflect on the discourse surrounding recent exhibitions of American art in Europe. At these and other programs, American art is explored in an interdisciplinary American studies framework, with all the attendant benefits and dangers. American art also appears in U.K. university curricula within art history programs. Typically offered as options for secondand final-year students who have already taken the introduction to Western art, these courses tend to be specific in period or thematic focus. While the emphasis is often post-1945, as in the New York School course at the University of Leeds, Michael Hatt examines an earlier moment in Modern American Art, 1900–1930 at the University of Warwick, and Andrew Hemingway teaches Inventing the Americans: Issues in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture at University College London. While sharing the common difficulty of teaching the subject at some distance from its objects and archives, art history and American studies programs in Britain provide distinct disciplinary frames for American art. In the opening sessions of my Realisms module, I have to combine discussion of Thomas Eakins’s career with a crash course in how to read a painting, but when we come to social realism I can rely on existing knowledge of the Depression and the New Deal. Teaching students with strong foundations in methodology and with the background provided by the course The Traditions and Institutions of Western Art, Michael Hatt includes novels and cultural histories on his reading lists to provide context of earlytwentieth-century America. Both situations demand that teachers think closely about what American art requires. As yet, U.K. academics have not concluded that encounters with American art need to be framed by an American art survey. A trawl through teaching syllabuses reveals no evidence of such a course being taught. Anecdotally, at least, this approach appears to work. Students find ways of discussing the images they are shown in class, and in the courses I teach and moderate, I have read outstanding essays on racial stereotypes in early-twentieth-century advertising imagery, Edward Hopper’s sense of space and place, and historical references

Liberalism, Nation, and Race

Signaling the absorption of "whiteness studies" into the American historiographical mainstream, American Crucible is a major effort to reinterpret twentieth-century U.S. history in light of the power of race (and to a lesser extent of class and gender) to determine the national destiny. 1 Moreover, in its attention to the meaning of liberalism and the liberal state, it takes its places in a long line of interpretations--from Alexis de Tocqueville and Joseph Schumpeter, to Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter, to John Higham and Christopher Lasch and Alan Dawley and Linda Kerber, to mention only a few--that ask a set of overlapping questions: Why has the United States been so resistant to the politics of class and so weak in its embrace of the social democratic state, which, in most European countries, became the solution to the crises of industrial capitalist society? In what ways have U.S. society and state been shaped by the peculiar American pattern of white ethnic assimilation and racial inequality, as well as by the emergence of mass culture and the ethnic and gender relations it encodes?

Edith Wharton's Brave New Politics (review)

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics Jean Rohloff Dale M. Bauer. Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. 225 pp. $55.00 (Hardcover); $17.50 (Paperback) Edith Wharton’s later post-World War I novels have long been dismissed as aesthetically flawed, culturally nostalgic, and politically conservative, even reactionary, when compared to her earlier works. In its challenge to this traditional view, Dale M. Bauer’s Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics is very welcome, even “brave” itself. Bauer argues that one of the main reasons critics have viewed Wharton’s later fiction as the product of a writer wilfully disengaged from the cultural trends and political forces that emerged in the twenties and thirties is because Wharton’s “ambivalence makes her difficult, if not impossible, to pin down” (18). Indeed, Bauer sees this ambivalence as revealing the depth, complexity, and introspective nature of Wharton’s dialogue with modern culture. In chapter 1, Bauer places Summer (1917) in the context of the emerging national preoccupation with social engineering that fostered debates about family dynamics, heredity, anthropology, and, ultimately, eugenics. Bauer sees Wharton’s novel as representing not only Wharton’s first “participation in the cultural dialogue on reproductive rights” (34), but as the beginning of her new engagement with the modern political atmosphere. Seeing a form of cultural scapegoating behind the new theories of family heredity and maternal culpability, Wharton blurs the distinctions between “civilized” and “primitive” people and between “good” and “bad” mothering portrayed in Summer. This ambivalence, Bauer contends, is effective in questioning the reductive binary logic of eugenics doctrines and taking a stand against the public interference in private sexuality and morality these doctrines ultimately called for. The second chapter argues that The Mother’s Recompense (1925) represents Wharton’s “sympathies with and her ambivalences about the ‘new America’” (53), specifically her concerns with the emergence of mass culture, the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, and the loss of ethical values she sees resulting from technological progress. Placing the novel against a rich backdrop of 1920s economic abundance theories, psychoanalysis, and popular novels, Bauer counters the retro-critical impulse to see Wharton as merely nostalgic and argues that in this work she “adopts a cultural dialogic, immersing herself in the rhetoric of the day in order to critique it” (55). Bauer ultimately sees the novel as representing Wharton’s progressive rejection of genetic engineering and the sentimentalization of motherhood. [End Page 308] A third chapter treats Wharton’s return to the social and reproductive power of women. In her analysis of Twilight Sleep (1927), Bauer contends that what critics have perceived as the “chaos” of the novel’s plot is actually Wharton’s representation of the chaos of the culture she is critiquing. Wharton leaves oppositions unresolved, such as that between the New Woman and the flapper, to foreground the contradictory nature of women’s position in that culture and to force her readers to analyze themselves. The Children (1928), Bauer asserts, is Wharton’s more explicit treatment of eugenics and her more vehement stand against it. In chapter 4, Bauer turns to Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its sequel The Gods Arrive (1932) and argues that in these works Wharton explores the intersection between politics and aesthetics. Bauer carefully illustrates that while these works may represent Wharton’s “most critical positions with regard to the new American mass culture”—in the form of advertising, free love, revivalism, and more—these positions also represent her most complex cultural theorizing, not her political conservativism (114). Once again, ambivalence marks Wharton’s representations in part because as a commercial writer she herself must come to terms with modernity in all its forms and because she once again recognizes and underscores the “vexed intricacies of women’s positions” (144) in movements and trends that are ultimately deeply gendered. Chapter 5 presents a compelling reading of “Roman Fever” establishing its often-overlooked context in 1930s Rome during the rise of fascism. Bauer argues that the “myth of origin” the Slades and the Ansleys have clung to concerning legitimacy and respectability is similar to all myths civilizations or individuals use to assert their authority and...

Bloods in the street: London street culture, “Industrial literacy,” and the emergence of mass culture in Victorian England

Bloods in the street: London street culture, “Industrial literacy,” and the emergence of mass culture in Victorian England

La Ville en Vol: Toulouse and the Cultural Legacy of the Airplane

The airplane and aviation have played a unique role in French modern culture during the twentieth century. Pilots and their flying machines captured the imagination of the French public as the heroes of the new age. The experience of flight was conceived as a metaphor of liberation, a celebration of the human spirit.' As a machine equated with the realm of emotion and elan, the airplane and the flight it made possible acted as catalysts in the invention of modern cultural images and practices. Ultimately, the airplane was the most compelling example of the ascendent technology that was essential to the emergence of mass culture over the course of the twentieth century. In this article I examine the role of aviation in the practice and representation of modern culture and image in the city of Toulouse from 1910 through the 1970s. I regard the city as a social and cultural construction where people create its meaning, define it, change it, and are conversely changed by their understanding of urban life. Toulouse has been one of the foremost provincial centers of French aeronautics throughout the twentieth century. Ringed by airports, watchful over each new aircraft, mesmerized by the exploits of its pilots, Toulouse became the cradle of French aviation, the land of flight. The material presented here delineates how the airplane was appropriated into the city's culture as a visual symbol of modernity and as the expression of