The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790-1860 (Clarendon Paperbacks) - Softcover

Anderson, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198182767 ISBN 13: 9780198182764

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1994

Synopsis

Patricia Anderson advances the challenging central argument that an essentially modern mass culture had begun to develop as early as 1840. Between 1790 and 1860 the widening dissemination of print led to the transformation and unprecedented expansion of popular cultural experience; and from the centre of this transformed culture there emerged a mass culture. The new culture's hallmark was its pictorial character. Patricia Anderson interprets a range of under-used or neglected sources, focusing on four illustrated magazines, but also examining penny fiction, broadsides, and other artefacts which played a significant part in the mass dissemination of imagery. A recurring theme is the declining role of art reproduction in people's otherwise expanded pictorial experience. The study questions the adequacy of simplistic concepts of class and culture. It combines modern cultural theory and historical evidence to demonstrate how people of all kinds, especially workers and women, interacted with the printed image and helped to shape an increasingly visual mass culture. In doing so, it offers a new way to look at and extract meaning from 19th-century popular illustration.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0198182767
• ISBN 13: 9780198182764
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 222