Urban Popular Culture and Entertainment (Routledge Studies in Cultural History)

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.

Antje Dietze is a researcher in the Collaborative Research Center "Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition" at Leipzig University, Germany. Her main areas of interest include transnational, transregional, and urban history, Cold War and post-socialist cultures, cultural transfers, and the media and entertainment industries.

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).