Popular Cultures/Cultures of the Popular: 1870-1945
 From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century critical
judgements about popular culture remained extremely diverse; theorists both
celebrated the emergence and preservation of popular cultural forms and
lamented the rise of new market-driven cultural commodities. Perhaps
because of such diversity, there are areas in which a thorough assessment
of the relationships within and between these positions remains to be
done. Popular culture was itself extremely diverse and developments in
critical studies have helped to produce a more detailed picture of the
forms that popular culture took at that time. Recent work in nineteenth
century and modernist studies has also begun to question the degree to
which 'high' and 'low' literary forms remained separate during this
period. Nevertheless, the interaction between and within these different
cultural modes is still requires further elaboration.
         The English Literature Group at the University of Hertfordshire is
launching a series of research seminars intended to explore the questions
around popular culture and theories of the popular during this
period. These papers might address the following areas:

Do the attempts to theorise the popular from this period offer any future
directions for literary studies?

Have the contributions of mass literacy and literary commodification been
adequately theorised in terms of their contribution to either popular
cultural forms or the changing attitudes towards such cultural formations?

Are the conventional explanations of how the relations between popular
culture and 'high' literary culture changed and developed during this
period still adequate?

How coherent or diverse was popular culture at any time during these years?

What sort of interaction occurred between the apparently contradictory
attitudes towards popular culture and/or literary culture?

How much influence did the theorising of popular culture have upon popular
cultural formations?

Paper abstracts approximately 500 words in length, should be sent to Liam
Connell l.connell_at_herts.ac.uk by 1st September 2003.

A selection of papers from this series will be published in the journal
Critical Survey.
http://www.herts.ac.uk/fhle/faculty/humanities/web%20pages/literature/critical_survey.htm

_________________________________

Dr Liam Connell
Department of Humanities
University of Hertfordshire
Wall Hall
Watford Campus
Aldenham
WD25 8AT

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Received on Tue Feb 25 2003 - 13:04:10 EST