Popular Culture in Europe since 1800

Tobias Becker is a historian and curator based in Berlin. His publications include Inszenierte Moderne: Populäres Theater in Berlin und London, 1880–1930 (2014), Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin, 1890–1939, ed. with Len Platt and David Linton (2014) and Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia (forthcoming).Len Platt is Professor Emeritus of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His previous publications include Writing London and the Thames Estuary 1576–2016 (2017), James Joyce: Texts and Contexts (2012), Joyce, Race and Finnegans Wake (2007) and Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 (2004).

• Introduction / Chapter 1 Reading Cultures — Modernity and the Word / Chapter 2 Seeing — The Rise of Visual Culture / Chapter 3 Performance — Rational Entertainment and Musical Theatre / Chapter 4 Play — Games in Modern Europe / Chapter 5 Music — From Folksong to Pop / Chapter 6 Film — European Genre Movies / Chapter 7 Television — A Popular Culture and Its Politics / Chapter 8 Digital Europe — The Video Game

From Zazel the Human Cannonball to the Eurovision Song Contest, Tobias Becker and Len Platt explore the trajectory of popular culture and mass entertainment in the modern age. This is an ambitious but completely accessible book for students and the general reader.Professor Rohan McWilliam, Anglia Ruskin UniversityThis wide-ranging but concise overview puts popular culture at the heart of the story of modern Europe. Surveying forms and genres from motion pictures and musical theater to pop music and video games, it reveals how technological innovations and exchanges of ideas remade culture across three centuries. Popular culture is built on the interplay between the local and the global, Europe and America, "high" and "low" – this illuminating work makes those complex processes accessible to students. Julia Sneeringer, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA