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Inventing Popular Culture from Folklore to Clobalization. John Storey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 149. $61.95 (cloth).
Inventing Popular Culture is part of Blackwell Publishing's "Manifesto" series, which provides prominent scholars an opportunity to summarize the cutting edge of research in their area of study to a broad audience, as well as take a polemical stand on debates in their field. John Storey has a history of producing monographs that clearly outline major arguments in cultural studies; here he surveys a generation's worth of scholarship on one of the key topics of cultural studies, the history and political significance of popular culture. The book promises to provide readers with the cultural-studies interpretation of the history of middle-class interest in popular culture, and it delivers on this promise.
Specifically, Storey draws on the work of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Antonio Gramsci in order to provide a historical overview of the career of the concept of popular culture, in modernity and beyond. Historically, Storey argues, the story has been deployed in a manner that reinforces pre-existing prejudices of intellectual elites toward "the masses." Inventing Popular Culture details the construction of intellectual chauvinism toward non-intellectuals beginning in the Romantic era, escalating in modernity, and still prompting the condescension of elites in our own time.
Storey also details the creation of a trope governing scholarly discussion of popular culture for a century, where pop culture is valued provided its artifacts or popular audiences are on the verge of disappearing. Repeatedly, Storey explains, the discourse of professional intellectuals constructs a feckless mass as it delineates the ways of the folk, a...