Inventing the Popular

<p>Inventing the Popular: Working-Class Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France explores texts written published and disseminated by a politically and socially active group of working-class writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a network of exchanges featuring newspapers poems and prose fiction these writers embraced a vision of popular culture that represented a clear departure from more traditional oral and printed forms of popular expression; at the same time their writing strategically resisted nascent forms of mass culture including the daily press and the serial novel. Coming into writing at a time when Romanticism had expanded beyond the borders of the lyric <i>je</i> these poets explored the social dimensions of connectivity and social relation finding interlocutors and supporters in the likes of Pierre-Jean de Béranger Alphonse de Lamartine George Sand and Eugène Sue. The relationships they developed among themselves and the major figures of an increasingly socially-oriented Romanticism were as rich with emancipatory promise as well as with reactionary temptation. They constitute an extensive archive of everyday life and utopian anticipation that reframe social romanticism as a revelatory if problematic model of engaged writing.</p><p></p>