Bettina R. Lerner

The first half of the nineteenth century gave rise to important changes in the ways popular culture was produced and consumed in France. “Inventing the Popular” is a study of the newspapers, almanacs, histories, novels, poetry, and spectacles which redefined the place and meaning of popular practices within the broader cultural field. These texts situate the modern notion of popular at the convergence of political and artistic ideals, while outlining the distinctions between high and low, dominant and subordinate, authentic and artificial which continue to structure mass culture and the ideologies it replicates.