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In 1957 Canada became the first country outside the British Isles to adopt and adapt the arts council model, due to the influence of Vincent Massey, who returned to Canada after spending ten years in London as a diplomat. Massey is the ideological and institutional link between Great Britain and Canada, and the chapter examines his arts advocacy in Canada and the influence of American foundations. Massey chaired the Royal Commission that recommended the establishment of the Canada Council; the members of the Royal Commission have been characterized as a ‘Canadian clerisy.’ However, the Canada Council did not duplicate the mission or administrative structure of the Arts Council of Great Britain. The early Canada Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, Letters, Humanities and Social Sciences was an omnibus organization that supported academic research, made grants to artists and arts organizations, distributed capital funds to the universities, and oversaw the country’s cultural diplomacy program.

This chapter on Sherlock fandom focuses on the fan convention Sherlocked as a manifestation of economic hierarchies in fan cultures. The Holmesian oeuvre of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sits in an uneasy position between popular and high culture, and this chapter probes this tension through the lens of SuperWhoLock as an example of fan hierarchies. This chapter ties the cultural hierarchies in SuperWhoLock fandom to the economic and class hierarchies of the convention.

This chapter offers an analytical assessment of Keynes’s influence on post-war arts policy by examining the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) as a policy model. It argues that both Keynes’s political philosophy as a Liberal and his underlying moral approach to government policy shaped his approach to arts policy. Two organizations with which Keynes was involved inspired his plans for the ACGB: the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and the University Grants Committee (UGC). He was appointed chairman of CEMA in 1942, and as bursar of Kings College, Cambridge, knew about government funding of academic research. Two characteristics of the policy model—the notion of ‘distance’ from government and the emphasis on professional standards—both associated with Keynesian cultural thinking, are explored in this chapter.

It has become an often-repeated maxim that silent films were not usually silent and that there was habitually some sort of musical/sound accompaniment for them, ranging from the basic (an out-of-tune piano with a limited improvising player) to the elaborate (a large orchestra playing a specially written score). In recent years, there has been something of an explosion in the performance of live music to silent films. Whereas even a decade ago, a silent film with live music was a very occasional treat, these days one does not have to go too far afield to find such events.1 They appear to offer a unique experience that is qualitatively different from synchronized sound film screenings. This also allows scope for musicians, who are able to improvise and experiment, to write music in a certain idiom, to take the opportunities offered by moving away from the centre of the stage or historically reconstruct the music that would have been heard at the time of the film’s release. Among reasons for the burgeoning live music for silent films culture is the elevated cultural status that relatively recently has become associated with silent films. They are generally seen as closer to art, in contrast with the popular forms of cinema evident at multiplexes, and have this potentially high culture status bolstered by their association with cultural heritage and its surrounding discourses.

The Fall, formed in Greater Manchester in the wake of the beginnings of punk in the United Kingdom, were famously described by legendary DJ John Peel as “always different, always the same”. From their foundations in 1976, the only constant member of the group is iconoclastic lead vocalist and lyricist Mark E. Smith. His original concept for the band as encapsulating “primitive music with avant-garde lyrics” has been the driving force of their output up to the present. They have also been the self-styled “white crap that talks back”, a lyric taken from “Crap Rap 2” on their debut LP Live at the Witch Trials (1979). This chapter will look at the strange (and frightening) world of the Fall, with particular focus on aspects of their career in the late 1970s and 1980s. They are a band who, at various times in their career, have synthesised both relatively popular and unpopular forms of music (from punk and acid house to ballet and German art rock). Their lyrics are, by turns, obscure, obfuscating, literary, absurd and hilarious, making reference to a quasi-Kitchen Sink (sur)realism as well as traditional “high culture” as such (the band’s name is itself a reference to an Albert Camus novel). They seem, thus, to be a reflection of a postmodern approach to art, whereby work that transcends older cultural boundaries seeks to “penetrate the cultural Establishment by appearing to celebrate the artistic merits of popular culture, the mass market and kitsch” (Turner 77).

Is it still relevant to explore the novel in the context of nations and nationalism in the Muslim world? Is it not other, audiovisual, techniques that have come to dominate in the dissemination of the ideology of nationalism? However, as Gregory Jusdanis points out in his chapter, it is against the backdrop of European nation formation that “the relationship between nationalism and literature [became] a symbiotic one” (cf. Anderson 1983). Literature gave nation form, and nation gave literature its privileged status as a central marker of the “high culture” that characterizes a particular nation and its people. The contributions to this volume, moreover, speak of the continued importance of looking also at literary fiction to explore the interplay between nation formation and religion in the Muslim world. Literary production’s centrality to nation formation is, for example, evident in the case of Kurdish literature (see Hashem Ahmadzadeh’s chapter). Here, the production of a distinctive Kurdish literature, including the novel, has long been central and integral to the struggle for the recognition of Kurdish identity — Kurds as a distinct nation and people — and for a Kurdish nation-state.

How does one approach empirically capturing the ways of ‘thinking, feeling and acting, and common sets of expectations’, as Wacquant (2014, p. 119) referred to habitus? Where does the theory end and methodology start? I have been an enthusiastic Bourdieu fan since the very first time I encountered his work in the Introductory Sociology course that I took as an undergraduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I was particularly taken by the concepts of cultural capital and habitus. It seemed like a fascinating idea that individuals and groups not only differ by wealth, status, or political power, but they also possess different cultural resources (that can be distinguished from education per se), and those resources play a role in social competition. I was born and raised in Soviet Moscow, and now I’m a professor at a US university. For many American students and scholars, the works of Bourdieu may seem a bit abstract because in the United States, the knowledge of and familiarity with high culture has become much less of a necessity in school exams, university admissions, or job interviews. By contrast, Russian society before the Communist revolution was extremely highly stratified by class. Higher classes admired, and to a certain degree adopted, features of European culture. A higher-class citizen in Tzarist Russia was often fluent in several languages (e.g., French, English and German), and was familiar with the European art, literature, music, and fashion.

Between 1890 and 1940, the national poet is refashioned in ways that affect conceptions of his Elizabethan audience in a particularly tangible manner. Shakespeare is now increasingly, and with increasing explicit-ness, claimed by groups that think of themselves as an avant-garde, or, alternatively, as the last stronghold of high culture, but in any case, as a minority. The discourse on his original audience reflects this process in at least three different (not always neatly separable) ways. It positions the Bard vis-a-vis the theatrical avant-garde of the turn of the century, it identifies (or rather, re-discovers) the early modern addressees for Shakespeare’s newly foregrounded complexity, and it uses his original audience to historicise him — and thus turns the serious study of Shakespeare into a prerogative for the specialist, that is, the professional, university-tenured Shakespearean. The most prominent change during these decades is hence that early modern theatregoers are imagined with increasing variety. Only rarely do established traditions become obsolete, thus old and new ideas about Shakespeare’s first audiences, even when they directly contradict each other, can be found side by side, with already existing strands of the discourse being subtly modified to accommodate new ‘discoveries’ about Shakespeare’s original clientele.

What makes a given appropriation of Shakespeare, a given echo of Shakespeare, worthy of a literary critic’s attention? What makes a critic ponder the Bard’s appearance on a calendar or a credit card, in ‘Fever’ or ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ in Forbidden Planet ox The Last Action Hero, in A Thousand Acres or Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)? Until recently — say, the 1980s — to attract a critic’s attention, an appropriation had to be located, like Shakespeare, within high culture, and was judged according to aesthetic standards applicable to any work of art, standards of beauty, coherence, suppleness, complexity, intelligence, and so on. Since the 1980s, critics have been attracted by appropriations of Shakespeare located outside of high culture, although, as Richard Burt points out, this attraction has not led critics to abandon the standards that previously demarcated these appropriations as out of bounds. Rather, if critics cannot assess appropriations according to the standards of high culture, they ‘try to reclaim’ them, ‘by showing that they are actually intelligent (that is, politically subversive, as present cultural criticism typically understands popular culture)’ (1998, p. xxix).

The previous chapter explored the various ways in which pain and violence could be constructed within a performative frame. This chapter seeks to establish a theoretical framework by which we may understand and analyse how and why the depiction of others in pain can make us laugh. This chapter therefore will address the following questions: why does there appear to be a particular link between popular cultural forms and comic pain? How is it possible for the human mind to respond to pain in others with laughter? What kinds of laughter are provoked? What role does empathy or a lack of empathy play? What role does objectification play in this? Building on this knowledge base the chapter than offers a model by which pain in performance can be analysed. Drawing on a range of comic and non-comic examples it is possible to establish exactly which factors have to be in place to provoke laughter in response to pain.

In the last decade of his life, Weber intensified his efforts to make sociology into a field of scientific inquiry distinct from the realm of political and moral judgments, and from the domain of aesthetic evaluations and tastes. Upholding a certain heroic ideal of scholarship as a bearer of high culture and a model of rational clarification in a world governed by machines rather than men, he resisted the temptation to yearn nostalgically for the days of the disengaged intellectual or to bemoan the ‘end of the age of the professor’, with its modernist canons of scientific validity, aesthetic freedom, and personal sovereignty (Ringer, 1969). In his closing remarks in ‘Technology and Culture’, where he asks his audience to consider ‘finally the intellectual cultural values!’, he rejects recent attempts to reduce the study of social and cultural life to mechanistic or materialistic processes, as if ‘anything, call it technology or the economy, is the “last” or “final” or “actual” cause of anything’ (TC:31). The ideals that he values are not only scientific and political but also aesthetic, perhaps following the lead of the Renaissance innovators in music and architecture who strove to invent experimental instruments for new ways of thinking, living, and acting. When a young colleague once asked him to identify what his own ‘leading supreme value’ might be, he reportedly responded by comparing his own method of work to the compositions and performances of a musical maestro silently conducting an orchestra of texts: Imagine that hanging from the ceiling of my study there are violins, pipes and drums, clarinets and harps. Now this instrument plays, now that. The violin plays, that is my religious value. Then I hear harps and clarinets and I sense my artistic value. Then it is the turn of the trumpet and that is my value of freedom.

So far we have witnessed that the controlled body came to prominence, aesthetically and narratively, in numerous films in the final decade of the twentieth century. BDSM was at the forefront of the new direction taken, and body modification sporadically but intensely negotiated the thorny issue of consenting to pain. United by themes of marking and controlling the body, plus the concomitant pleasure in suffering, there was, however, no unifying genre in either Chapter 2 or 3. In the current chapter though, a cohesive subgenre is discernible, and one might suggest that it is responsible for sustaining the mainstream’s fascination with pain into the twenty-first century. But unlike the BDSM of Sick, or the body modifications of Crash, its films display no immediate sense of consensual pleasure, for the most visible controlled body in question is the victim of the serial killer. And yet an impression of gratification remains within the text, for in these films a bound and gashed body is not enough to insist upon the murderer’s control. Instead, the creatively staged death scene suggests utter subjection and domination, but also a pleasure in the macabre beauty of the tormented body. The pleasure in pain manifests itself doubly: firstly as an absorption in the aestheticized treatment of the decimated body, and secondly through the investigating detective’s need to engage masochistically with the victim’s suffering.

John Doyle, Susan Ferrier’s great-nephew and editor of The Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier (1898), tells us in the opening sentence of the introduction that she ‘lived a life so quiet and uneventful as to afford little scope for a memoir’. Although he immediately qualifies this by stating that her correspondence might be of interest to readers of her ‘clever and still popular novels’ (7), Alexander Brunton seems to have cast his shadow here. Both relatives play the role of protector while exposing the humdrum life, almost devoid of interest, of women involved in the unedifying occupation of writing fiction. If becoming Professor of Oriental Languages, in the case of Brunton, and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in the case of Doyle, count as great events, then Ferrier’s life might seem dull, yet Doyle’s statement is difficult to judge as anything but deceptive unless we share the very strict criterion that only public office is of any merit. If that were the case, either the gender-genre division, low against high culture, becomes irrefutable or else Scott’s life, and his dedication to literature rather than the law, would also rank him among the nondescript.

This chapter approaches various occurrences of scientific nationalism in nineteenth-century Hungary; the term ‘scientific nationalism’ stands for both nationalism occurring within science and nationalism based on science. The latter form of nationalism, which used science directly for political purposes as an argument and justification for nationalist politics, had gradually become a widespread ideology in Hungary in the second part of the nineteenth century. It was not science, but politics, that was nationalist; however, science could not stay neutral on this central political issue. It developed a national character manifested both in its institutional structure and in its cognitive contents.

Dwight Macdonald’s trenchant essay ‘Masscult and Midcult’ (1960) is themost sweeping – and the most famous – formulation by an American of the post-war animus against middlebrow culture. Yet ‘Masscult and Midcult’ was not the opening shot in Macdonald’s war against the pernicious products of the entertainment and publishing industries but, rather, the culminating episode in a campaign the writer had been waging for some time. By the early 1950s, Macdonald was already condemning particular works that, in his view, represented philistine assaults on art and language, including Colin Wilson’s British best-seller The Outsider. In 1958, he issued his most inflammatory such piece, a review in Commentary excoriating James Gould Cozzens’s widely praised novel By Love Possessed.1

In the Founding Legend of Western Civilization, Richard Waswo shows how the Latin words for culture – culto, cultum, col – are also the root words for the verb ‘to cultivate’, and thereby serve to link all manifestations of high culture to the tilling of the soil. These ideas, created by and for settled agricultural communities that sow, harvest, and build walls and cities further serve to qualify as savage all other relations that people have with nature. Indeed, the ‘image of civilization is the city, usually in the form of walls and towers’ (Waswo 1997, pp. xi, 1). One obvious example of this is that for the Romans, the goddess Cybele – protectress of agricultural and civic life – is represented seated on a throne wearing a crown of walls and towers. Conversely, it was Herodotus who helped to define barbarians as people whose primary characteristic was their ‘ignorance of ploughing and sowing and the fact that they do not dwell in houses’ (Hartog 1988, p. 194). Accordingly, as the rhetoric that associated cultivation with civility and order began to emerge as an ideological strategy in Tudor Ireland, the humanist officials responsible for policies in Ireland became committed to the establishment of urban settlements and to the attendant material culture that they considered as essential markers of civilization.2

Hundreds of thousands of emigres, most of them Jews, fled Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s as Hitler swept across the European continent. Of those who arrived on the shores of the United States, thousands contributed to key developments in American culture. Typically, their contributions drew on European high culture and they frequently remained aloof from or critical of American culture, which many of them found debased by obedience to the dictates of the mass market. Many intellectuals gave serious attention to an understanding of popular culture but most of them did so with an elitist disdain towards American culture. The most important and critical emigre observers of American culture were members of the Frankfurt School — Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer among them. In their now classic essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, first published in 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno asserted that what they called the culture industry had succeeded in shaping taste, as intermediary institutions such as the family had weakened. Capitalism in their eyes powerfully formed consumer culture which, in turn, promoted a false consciousness among consumers, degrading their lives and lulling them into passivity. Adorno and Horkheimer held out the possibility that ‘Culture’, by which they most prominently meant that inspired by avantgarde creativity, had a critical function in holding up an alternative version of reality.

For centuries high culture has transcended national boundaries. During the twentieth century, and especially in the post-war period, popular culture has also become transnational. Comparative studies of popular culture remain, though, relatively rare, and much of what has been produced is concerned with cinema, as an element in the supposed Americanization of Western Europe. This emphasis is potentially misleading. Cinema is characterized by a particular structure dictated by the heavy capital requirements of the industry, which is consequently dominated by a handful of major companies operating from one world centre. Even independent films require finance at a level beyond the reach of amateurs; there is consequently no significant ‘garage’ sector in film, and cinema’s influence is inevitably a ‘top-down’ one. Popular music is different. The development of the international record industry from the 1960s has been accompanied by the proliferation of amateur performers at every level of competence. The multinational producers who run the industry have always sought — and needed — to draw upon this pool of potential. As a result the music market has always been partly shaped by the artistic preference of performers and the waves of consumer fashion — forces which were in fact interlinked. This was particularly true at the time that the industry first became genuinely transnational in the 1960s.

This collection of essays seeks to engage with figurations of the femme fatale in a wide range of cultural texts, at different socio-historical junctures and in distinct national/geographical terrains. The idea for the collection arose from a distinct sense that, while the femme fatale figure is a recurrent presence in both popular and high culture, the figure is a perennial site of uncertainty, raising challenging questions and inviting further investigation.