Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization

Inventing Popular Culture is a lively and accessible history of the idea of popular culture by one of the leading experts in the field. Written from the critical perspective of cultural studies, the book traces the invention and reinvention of the concept of popular culture from the eighteenth-century “discovery” of folk culture to contemporary accounts of the cultural impact of globalization.

Inventing Popular Culture argues that the idea of popular culture is an invention of intellectuals. The book does not present an analysis of particular texts and activities which have been, or could be defined as, popular culture; instead it explores the changing intellectual ways of constructing texts and activities as popular culture and how these intellectual discourses articulate questions of culture and power. Examining the relationship between the concept of popular culture and key issues in cultural analyses such as hegemony, postmodernism, identity, questions of value, consumerism, and everyday life, Inventing Popular Culture presents an engaging assessment of one of the most debated concepts of recent times.