Cheap print and the people : European perspectives on popular literature / edited by David Atkinson and Steve Roud.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Atkinson, David.

Contributor:

Atkinson, David, editor.

Roud, Stephen, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Popular literature--Europe--History and criticism.

Popular literature.

Genre:

Libros electrónicos.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (379 pages)

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK : Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2019.

Summary:

In every country across Europe, at some point or other during the last five hundred years, cheap printed materials were the staple diet of ordinary people, providing a rich array of entertainment, education, and information. They came in various forms, but were usually variations on the theme of single sheets or simple booklets, and they were carried far and wide in pedlars' packs and sold in the streets, at fairs and markets and wherever crowds gathered, as well as in backstreet shops. Their content was as broad as can be imagined: news and scandal, crimes and last-dying confessions of murderers, divinations, instructional works, wonder stories, miracles, folktales and legends, love stories, celebrations of national victories and lamentations for the good old days. They were often couched in the form of poetry or song, and included pictures in the form of woodcuts and engravings to add to their appeal. In every country across Europe, governments and local and religious authorities tried at times to suppress or control these cheap printed materials. Sometimes, too, the authorities would adopt the format of cheap print to spread their own moral and conformist messages. The educated elites almost always treated cheap print with disdain, but the people continued to buy these items in their tens of thousands, and the printers knew exactly what they wanted. Neglected and reviled for centuries, cheap print shines a light on the culture and lives of ordinary people. This is the first volume to take a pan-European perspective, with each chapter detailing the experience of a particular country or region, offering the reader the opportunity to progress from the particular to a continent-wide overview. This combination of the ubiquity of the materials and overarching themes with the variations wrought by local circumstances can be summed up in the phrase always the same, but everywhere different. -- Source other than Library of Congress.

Contents:

Introduction / Steve Round and David Atkinson

Popular literature in Spain: A mouse's tale / Alison Sinclair

Female transgression and gallows literature in the Spanish literatura de cordel / Immaculada Casas-Delgado and Juan Gomis

Ballads and broadsides in France: accounting for an absence / David Hopkin

Itinerant ballad singers and songs printed on broadside sheets in Lower Brittany / Daniel Giraudon

Devotional and demonic narratives in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dutch penny prints / Jeroen Salman

The Scandinavian Skilling ballad: A transnational cultural heritage / Siv Gøril Brandtzœg and Karin Strand

Singing out loud: selling Skillingstrykk in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Norway / Astrid Nora Ressem

Images, words, and book production in the Russian empire: popular prints, Lubok books, and illustrated magazines / Hanna Chuchvaha

Cheap print for the Ukrainian people: Lubok books, "Little Russian literature", and "literature for the people" / Viktoriia Voloshenko

Street literature in south-eastern Europe: the example of Bulgaria / Klaus Roth

Cheap print in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hungary / Éva Mikos and Rumen István Csörsz

The cultural importance of broadside songs in Slovenia / Marija Klobc̆ar

Cheap printing and street sellers in early modern Italy / Laura Carnelos.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-5275-3610-6

OCLC:

1149125243