A cultural new deal : the expansion of a common market for fiction in early European media culture (1840-1940).
Résumé
In the hundred years between 1830 and 1940, Europe underwent radical change, and entered modernity. This decisive transformation did not occur only in the fields of politics and economics, technology and society, but also in the realm of culture. Multimedia and mass culture emerged, and expanded to sweep all before it, crossing linguistic and national boundaries and overturning cultural practices, sparking the imagination of countless individuals, providing new icons for the collective imagination, and precipitating the advent of a new European identity--or set of identities. From the craze for serialised novels to the international success of the super-productions in silent cinema during the 1920s, popular fictions never stopped circulating. They made their way from one country to another, from one continent to another, from print to celluloid. In the framework of an international project (2008-2010) funded by the European Culture Office and titled "EPOP: Popular Roots of European Culture through Films, Comics and Serialized Literature," as chief project of Limoges team I studied the history and the main aspects of this cultural new deal, which implied the birth of a new popular culture that cuts across all the media, and whose first occurrences appeared in the 1840s, for instance with the scenic adaptations of Alexandre Dumas's novels in France and Spain. Without any doubt, popular fictions must be so considered as transnational trailblazers because they gave rise to wide and permanent cultural transfers and mixing of representations, unconstrained by national borders. Favoured by the economic goals of cultural industries, always looking for new audiences, translating and adapting successful novels, mass fiction turned out to be cosmopolitan. I will support this thesis referring to a broad panel of examples concerning adaptations from Alexandre Dumas's, Paul Féval's and Conan Doyle's works, stage and film melodramas which travelled between Europe and America, French novelizations of American movie serials, etc. I will therefore suggest that the first occurrences of processes now theorized as "globalization", "glocalization" or "transmedia story telling" are obvious nearly a century before our contemporary "convergence culture"(Jenkins).
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