The Making of English Popular Culture

The Making of English Popular Culture provides an account of the making of popular culture in the nineteenth century.

While a form of what we might describe as popular culture existed before this period, John Storey has assembled a collection that demonstrates how what we now think of as popular culture first emerged as a result of the enormous changes that accompanied the industrial revolution. Particularly significant are the technological changes that made the production of new forms of culture possible and the concentration of people in urban areas that created significant audiences for this new culture.

Consisting of fourteen original chapters that cover diverse topics ranging from seaside holidays and the invention of Christmas tradition, to advertising, music and popular fiction, the collection aims to enhance our understanding of the relationship between culture and power, as explored through areas such as ‘race’, ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender. It also aims to encourage within cultural studies a renewed historical sense when engaging critically with popular culture by exploring the historical conditions surrounding the existence of popular texts and practices.

Written in a highly accessible style The Making of English Popular Culture is an ideal text for undergraduates studying cultural and media studies, literary studies, cultural history and visual culture.

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK. He has published extensively in the field of cultural studies, including ten books, the most recent being the seventh edition of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (2015). His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. He is also on editorial/advisory boards in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the USA, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Dresden, the University of Henan, the University of Vienna and the University of Wuhan.