Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment: Experiences from Northern, East-Central, and Southern Europe, 1870s–1930s

Abstract

This book is part of an ongoing transnational turn in cultural history. Studies on the history of urban popular culture and the entertainment industries increasingly engage with the European or global circulation of genres, actors, and shows, especially during the period of massive growth and expansion of the sector from the 1870s to the 1930s. Nevertheless, a large part of this research remains focused on exchanges between Western and Central European, and North American metropolises. To provide a fuller picture of the emergence and cross-border transfer of different genres of popular culture, this volume investigates Northern, East Central, and Southern European cities and their relations with each other and the West. The authors analyze the mediating agents, transnational networks, and local responses to new forms of entertainment from Madrid to Vyborg, and from Istanbul to Reykjavík. These examples re-focus the history of urban popular culture in Europe in view of multidirectional transfers and a wider range of regional experiences. 

Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in the history of popular culture in modern societies, particularly those studying urban centers in Europe, and their transnational and transregional connections.

Biographical Note

Dr. Antje Dietze (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)

Antje Dietze studied cultural studies in Leipzig and Paris, earning her PhD in 2012 from Leipzig University for a work on the role of cultural organizations and artistic practice during the post-socialist transition in Germany. As part of her current research she spent 2014/15 as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) P.R.I.M.E. research fellow at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Montreal (Canada). Her research interests include entertainment and the arts, cultural industries, and cultural change within the study of culture and transnational history, focusing particularly on Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Alexander Vari (Marywood Unversity, Scranton, USA)

Alexander Vari is Professor of History at Marywood University in Scranton, USA. He has written on the history of urban tourism, nationalist mythmaking, and popular culture in Budapest and Paris, and is one of the co-editors of Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (2013).