Download or read book Popular Culture in Modern France written by Brian Rigby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `Culture' is one of the most frequently used terms in the French vocabulary. It sells not only books, newspapers and magazines but also consumer products and political parties. But what are the meanings of `culture populaire'? What have the French understood by it, and what is its history? Brian Rigby's lively and cogent study traces changing notions of popular culture in France, from 1936 - the year of the Popular Front - to the present day. Asking why `culture' has become such a fiercely contested term, Rigby considers the work of the major French theorists, including Barthes, Bourdieu and Baudrillard.
Download or read book Understanding Popular Culture written by Steven L. Kaplan and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Popular Culture
Download or read book Imagining the popular in contemporary French culture written by Diana Holmes and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book is about what ‘popular culture’ means in France, and how the term’s shifting meanings have been negotiated and contested. It represents the first theoretically informed study of the way that popular culture is lived, imagined, fought over and negotiated in modern and contemporary France. It covers a wide range of overarching concerns: the roles of state policy, the market, political ideologies, changing social contexts and new technologies in the construction of the popular. But it also provides a set of specific case studies showing how popular songs, stories, films, TV programmes and language styles have become indispensable elements of ‘culture’ in France. Deploying yet also rethinking a ‘Cultural Studies’ approach to the popular, the book therefore challenges dominant views of what French culture really means today.
Download or read book Handbook of French Popular Culture written by Pierre L. Horn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1991-05-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the world, there has been much scholarly and general interest in French popular culture, but very little has been written on the subject in English. The authors of this book address that lack in a series of highly readable and well-documented essays describing French life styles, attitudes, and entertainments as well as the writers and performers currently favored by the French public. Several chapters explore French tastes in popular literature and other reading matter, including comics, cartoons, mystery and spy fiction, newspapers and magazines, and science fiction. Film, popular music, radio, and television are also discussed in detail, and influences from other cultures--particularly American imports--are assessed. The remaining essays examine French sports, the use of leisure time, the French style of eating and drinking, and relations between men and women and their attitudes toward romantic love. Each chapter provides up-to-date historical and bibliographic information that will enable the reader to pursue subjects of particular interest. Written by an international group of specialists, this handbook offers the benefits of broad coverage, a variety of viewpoints, and solid scholarship.
Download or read book The French in Love and War written by Charles Rearick and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes developments in French popular culture between 1914 and 1945, and argues that the harsh times led to the emergence of images glorifying the common Frenchman in songs, film, and popular literature
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture written by Nicholas Hewitt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-11 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France entered the twentieth century as a powerful European and colonial nation. In the course of the century, her role changed dramatically: in the first fifty years two World Wars and economic decline removed its status as a world power, whilst the immediate post-war era was marked by wars of independence in its colonies. Yet at the same time, in the second half of the century, France entered a period of unprecedented growth and social transformation. Throughout the century and into the new millennium France retained its former international reputation as a centre for cultural excellence and innovation and its culture, together with that of the Francophone world, reflected the increased richness and diversity of the period. This 2003 Companion explores this vibrant culture, and includes chapters on history, language, literature, thought, theatre, architecture, visual culture, film and music, and discuss the contributions of popular culture, Francophone culture, minorities and women.
Download or read book Colette s Republic written by Patricia A. Tilburg and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In France's Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village's battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873-1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.
Download or read book Society and Culture in Early Modern France written by Natalie Zemon Davis and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1975 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays, three of them previously unpublished, explore the competing claims of innovation and tradition among the lower orders in sixteenth-century France. The result is a wide-ranging view of the lives and values of men and women (artisans, tradesmen, the poor) who, because they left little or nothing in writing, have hitherto had little attention from scholars. The first three essays consider the social, vocational, and sexual context of the Protestant Reformation, its consequences for urban women, and the new attitudes toward poverty shared by Catholic humanists and Protestants alike in sixteenth-century Lyon. The next three essays describe the links between festive play and youth groups, domestic dissent, and political criticism in town and country, the festive reversal of sex roles and political order, and the ritualistic and dramatic structure of religious riots. The final two essays discuss the impact of printing on the quasi-literate, and the collecting of common proverbs and medical folklore by learned students of the "people" during the Ancien Régime. The book includes eight pages of illustrations.
Download or read book Social Change in Modern France written by Henri Mendras and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Change in Modern France is a concise and lucid account of the profound transformations that have reshaped French society over the past thirty years. The authors show how the characteristic institutions of the Third Republic have been weakened, destroyed, or severely altered in the face of a late and rapid industrialization. The church, the army, the trade unions, the schools, even the French communist party--all have lost their capacity to excite major conflict and tension, and in their stead a series of local institutions, voluntary associations and family ties have arisen, serving as the basic network for social relations and social life. Traditional French "joie de vivre" has assumed new forms, and, the authors maintain, a very sturdy and cohesive society has arisen, based on widespread consensus.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture written by Alex Hughes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1998 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international team of scholars contribute over 700 entries on contemporary French culture that range from Art, Gender, Politics and Literature to Media and the Economy. It is a vital companion for anyone interested in the culture of modern France.
Download or read book The Pride of Place written by Stephane Gerson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and middling provincials, of obscure historians and intellectual luminaries. Arguing that the "local" and modernity were interlaced, rather than inimical, between the 1820s and 1890s, Gerson explores the diverse uses of local memories in modern France—from their theatricality and commercialization to their political and pedagogical applications. The Pride of Place shows that, contrary to our received ideas about French nationhood and centralism, the "local" buttressed the nation while seducing Parisian and local officials. The state cautiously supported the cult of local memories even as it sought to co-opt them and grappled with their cultural and political implications. The current enthusiasm for local memories, Gerson thus finds, is neither new nor a threat to Republican unity. More broadly yet, this book illuminates the predicament of countries that, like France, are now caught between supranational forces and a revival of local sentiments.
Download or read book Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno written by Hugh Dauncey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In France during the 1960s and 1970s, popular music became a key component of socio-cultural modernisation as the music/record industry became increasingly important in both economic and cultural terms in response to demographic changes and the rise of the modern media. As France began questioning traditional ways of understanding politics and culture before and after May 1968, music as popular culture became an integral part of burgeoning media activity. Press, radio and television developed free from de Gaulle's state domination of information, and political activism shifted its concerns to the use of regional languages and regional cultures, including the safeguard of traditional popular music against the centralising tendencies of the Republican state. The cultural and political significance of French music was again revealed in the 1990s, as French-language music became a highly visible example of France's quest to maintain her cultural 'exceptionalism' in the face of the perceived globalising hegemony of English and US business and cultural imperialism. Laws were passed instituting minimum quotas of French-language music. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed developing issues raised by new technologies, as compact discs, the minitel telematics system, the internet and other innovations in radio and television broadcasting posed new challenges to musicians and the music industry. These trends and developments are the subject of this volume of essays by leading scholars across a range of disciplines including French studies, musicology, cultural and media studies and film studies. It constitutes the first attempt to provide a complete and up-to-date overview of the place of popular music in modern France and the reception of French popular music abroad.
Download or read book Americanism Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France written by David A. Pettersen and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.
Download or read book French Moves written by Felicia McCarren and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown another face of France: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to U.S. black culture to articulate their own difference, but in France hip-hop was championed by a Socialist cultural policy, subsumed into the cultural heritage, and instituted as a pedagogy. France supported hip-hop dance as an art of the suburbs: a multicultural mix of North African, African and Asian forms that circulate with classical and contemporary dance performance. French hip-hop develops into concert dance, becoming a civic discourse and legitimate employment, not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture. It nuances an Anglo-Saxon model of identity politics with a francophone identity poetics and grants its dancers a national profile as artists who develop dance techniques and transmit body-based knowledge. This book, the first in English to introduce readers to the French hip-hop movement, analyzes the choreographic development of hip-hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip-hoppers move beyond the suburbs, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.
Download or read book Contemporary French Cultural Studies written by William Kidd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of French culture has long ceased to be purely centred on literature. Undergraduate French courses now embrace all forms of cultural production and consumption, and students need to have a broad knowledge of everything from day-time TV and the latest detective novels to debates about national identity and immigration policies. This stimulating text is an introduction to the full range of contemporary French culture. Written by a group of leading academics both within and outside France, each chapter focuses on a topic from the French cultural scene today. Starting with an overview of resources for further information (both in print and online), the text discusses the varied forms of French cultural expression and looks critically at what 'Frenchness' itself means. The book also explores examples of cultural production ranging from sport, media and literature to theatre, cinema, festivals and music. An essential resource for students and scholars alike, this text provides detailed material and analysis, as well as a launch-pad for further study.
Download or read book Transnational France written by Tyler Stovall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling volume, Tyler Stovall takes a transnational approach to the history of modern France, and by doing so draws the reader into a key aspect of France's political culture: universalism. Beginning with the French Revolution and its aftermath, Stovall traces the definitive establishment of universal manhood suffrage and the abolition of slavery in 1848. Following this critical time in France's history, Stovall then explores the growth of urban and industrial society, the beginnings of mass immigration, and the creation of a new, republican Empire. This time period gives way to the history of the two world wars, the rise of political movements like Communism and Fascism, and new directions in popular culture. The text concludes with the history of France during the Fourth and Fifth republics, concentrating on decolonization and the rise of postcolonial society and culture. Throughout these major historical events Stovall examines France's relations with three other areas of the world: Europe, the United States, and France's colonial empire, which includes a wealth of recent historical studies. By exploring these three areas-and their political, social, and cultural relations with France-the text will provide new insights into both the nature of French identity and the making of the modern world in general.
Download or read book Stereo Comparative Perspectives on the Sociological Study of Popular Music in France and Britain written by Philippe Le Guern and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term 'Popular Music' has traditionally denoted different things in France and Britain. In France, the very concept of 'popular' music has been fiercely debated and contested, whereas in Britain and more largely throughout what the French describe as the 'Anglo-saxon' world 'popular music' has been more readily accepted as a description of what people do as leisure or consume as part of the music industry, and as something that academics are legitimately entitled to study. French researchers have for some decades been keenly interested in reading British and American studies of popular culture and popular music and have often imported key concepts and methodologies into their own work on French music, but apart from the widespread use of elements of 'French theory' in British and American research, the 'Anglo-saxon' world has remained largely ignorant of particular traditions of the study of popular music in France and specific theoretical debates or organizational principles of the making and consuming of French musics. French, British and American research into popular music has thus coexisted - with considerable cross-fertilization - for many years, but the barriers of language and different academic traditions have made it hard for French and anglophone researchers to fully appreciate the ways in which popular music has developed in their respective countries and the perspectives on its study adopted by their colleagues. This volume provides a comparative and contrastive perspective on popular music and its study in France and the UK.
