On 1 July 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army landed near Alexandria; by the end of the month he had crushed local forces outside Cairo in a fearsome display of firepower and discipline. In spite of French claims to be sympathetic towards Islam their brief governance of Egypt was characterised by ignorance and brutality towards the local population. One observer framed his views in a particularly pointed fashion: ‘The Egyptians could not remotely stand the French because of differences of religion, language and clothes; not to mention the old enmity that had existed between them since the time of the Sultan Baybars. The troops of King Louis of France came to their defeat here at the hands of the Muslim army [1250], and the memory of this is perpetuated by the name given to the town – Mansurah (meaning ‘the victorious’).’

‘A Splintered Past: History in the Irish Novel since 1990’ considers the ways in which contemporary Irish novelists have represented three phases of modern Irish history: the Famine; the revolutionary period; social liberalisation since the 1960s. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), in its relative optimism about the contribution of the catastrophe to national self-consciousness, is contrasted with Paul Lynch’s Grace (2017) and Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016). Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) provides a child’s-eye view of the Easter Rising, while Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) witnesses the Rising from the perspective of a soldier returned from the Second World War, and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) filters partition through childhood memories. As we reach Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster (2014) or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021), historical traumas become comprehensible only in personal terms, and the capacity for collective narrativisation is less prevalent or accessible.

This chapter examines the central role of radio and music within the mass media cultures of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, arguing that entertainment broadcasting functioned as a crucial, if often understated, instrument of political legitimation and social cohesion under fascism. The chapter traces the institutional development of German and Italian radio networks, emphasizing their hybrid political and commercial imperatives, and situating radio within a broader media ecology that blurred distinctions between propaganda and entertainment. Through analyses of request concerts, talent competitions, and touring variety programmes, it shows that the regimes cultivated participatory listening practices that integrated audiences into imagined national communities. At the same time, it demonstrates that these projects were inherently unstable due to listener agency and the persistence of distracted listening. The chapter argues for a more nuanced understanding of radio as a political medium whose power under fascism resided less in explicit messaging than in its capacity to produce shared sonic experience.

This chapter considers both the form and content of paperback fiction through a reading that places them in dialogue with other forms of popular culture, such as comics. Through a focus on controversies about content, the chapter considers differences attached to texts through their perceived audiences, both nationally and internationally, in the context of the United States seeking to assert itself as a global political and cultural leader. The chapter analyzes key texts of the 1950s, such as Peyton Place, Naked Lunch, Howl, EC Comics, and the novels of Mickey Spillane.

Japanese society embraces a rich variety of cultural forms that reflect its tradition, stratification, and regional expanse. To examine the internal diversity of Japanese culture as thoroughly as possible, this chapter first looks at two manifestations of its duality and then analyzes mass culture, folk culture, and alternative culture as three major spheres of popular culture. After confirming the culture’s plurality, the end of the chapter turns to the Japanese cultural presence in the transnational context.

For financial and personal reasons, Eliot was keen that Adam Bede should be popular, but that aspiration necessarily brought the novel into competition both with popular culture and the popular fiction by women that Eliot had criticised in 1856. Adam Bede explicitly recognises the challenges of its publishing context, and seeks, whilst exploiting some of the interests of popular fiction, to educate its readers both about the responsibilities of the novelist and their fiction to practise a responsible form of realism, and the readers’ own capacity for more substantial fare. The overwhelming popularity of Mrs Poyser and her home-spun wisdom sites the novel’s popularity in the nostalgic appeal of country life, but primarily, as the reviewer Anne Mozley argues, in its developing the reader’s sympathy with ordinary people, and in establishing a link with the reader based in the harmonious creation of memories of familiar places and emotions.

Chapter 21 focuses on Mário de Andrade’s 1928 Macunaíma and explores the connection between the author and the Amazon. It does so by examining the novel alongside Andrade’s travel diary, which records his 1927 expedition to the Amazon from May to August. This diary was published posthumously in 1976 as O turista aprendiz. While earlier studies have primarily relied on ethnographic sources – especially Koch-Grünberg, but also João Barbosa Rodrigues, Capistrano de Abreu, and Couto de Magalhães – as the main influences on Andrade’s Macunaíma, this chapter adds a new dimension by bringing in Andrade’s own travel diary. It also places Andrade’s work in a broader context by referencing other Brazilian and foreign travelers to the Amazon, showing how he blended their accounts with his own experiences. In this way, O turista aprendiz acts as a kind of “anteroom” to Macunaíma, both complementing the novel and offering a key to understanding it.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

The essay considers the relationship of the US empire to torture as a practice and an aspect of entertainment. Focusing on depictions of torture in film and television after 9/11, the article also looks back to the nineteenth century to show how torture functioned as a type of entertainment in an earlier historical context. Lazo argues that the use of torture in popular culture amounts to a type of “torturetainment” meant to entice the audience with its spectacle of violence. Through these forms of torturetainment, US cultural producers recognize, critique and flaunt the US willingness to use torture as a tactic to support its imperial ambitions while also masking the operations of empire through a focus on alternate narratives related to the goals of protagonists. These cultural representations thus reveal torture as part of the arsenal of empire and a discursive framing related to social conditions within a national polis. The chapter examines the film Zero, Dark Thirty (2012) and a dime novel from 1851 to emphasize the longue durée of torture as entertainment within the context of the US empire.

The chapter provides an overview of the multifaceted cultural significance of Allen Ginsberg. While Ginsberg appeared in numerous works, performances, and actions from the late 1950s until his death in 1997 (and continues to enjoy an afterlife in popular and literary culture), in every case these appearances mean something. Hypersensitive Beatnik misfit, spokesman for the Summer of Love, conduit for Eastern mysticism, drug advocate, punk rocker, itinerant scholar, and gay-rights champion (to name only the most prominent of Ginsberg’s manifestations), Ginsberg’s lasting representation – that of the gifted and innovative poet – is the one that will linger.

Allen Ginsberg taught Shelley’s notion of the poet as legislator and the Romantic ideologeme that art could save the world, and conceived of the poet as shaman. He heard his father recite Romantic verse daily for years before he learned to read. This informed his championing of poetry’s “aural renaissance,” in which he played a role. Ginsberg’s early exposure to the first blues recordings made him a lifelong aficionado who taught blues as poetry. Immersion with Kerouac and friends in the New York jazz scene of the 1940s–1950s informed his and Kerouac’s writing, as they adapted jazz – which they equated to “Black speech” – in their writing. The Beats’ synthesis of post-Whitmanic American poetics with the rhythms and inflections of African-American vernacular speech took that argot to the masses, and influenced the 1960s generation of rockers, in particular the two musical phenomena that would carry the Beat/Romantic vision into global mass culture: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

Early-twentieth-century empire soaked into European culture. That occurred via new visual media and other imaginative means: cinema, photography, and popular press; zoos, trade fairs, and colonial exhibitions; postcards and advertisements; colonial commodity consumption; memoirs, travelogues, and exploration; quality literature and popular fiction. Europe’s relations with exotically faraway, excitingly wealth-producing, aesthetically enticing, but threatening overseas worlds saturated identity and national character. Europeans knew themselves via their racially “othered” colonized populations, who enabled a vivid topography of the imagination. Resulting languages of difference and belonging delivered many resources for individual and collective self-understanding. Cultural media were legion: mass-circulation fictions and recognized novels; children’s comic books; polar expeditions and Central Asian exploration; new Black sporting celebrity; Negrophilia surrounding Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. “Race” acquired many sinister applications, from social Darwinism and eugenics to the hardening of the “color line.” The most aggressively elaborate version was the Nazis’ racial state.

This chapter argues that the relationship between the online world and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Popular culture, and the increasing use of social media by young people and children has seen many traditionalists lament how our culture has declined, and worry about how educationally corrupted our schools have become. Its absence has been used to suggest that our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency – children and young people. The keen-eyed among you might note that this chapter is full of false binaries... perhaps this tells us something about the nature of the topic. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement. This is not even a simple chapter to write; the references will likely be outdated by the time I finish writing this sentence. So read on with a little grace, and a little humor.