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Popular entertainment media are implicit (and sometimes explicit) means by which a culture describes itself, including the images and ideas, stories, and fantasies that draw from and supply its religious imagination. Using in-depth interviews with 71 young people who describe themselves as not very religious, this chapter explores the role of these media in young peoples’ understandings of religion and spirituality. Most of these teens freely and energetically explore the “what if?” world of the entertainment media. Some are fascinated by supernatural spiritual images that echo the “dark side” of evangelicalism’s emphasis on sin and punishment. Others see in films and television programs signs of spiritual comfort. And a few, the true secularists, see nothing spiritual at all.

The Cantonese displayed acceptance of Westerners and their cultures in the late imperial and Republican period, in spite of their reputation for being xenophobic and anti-foreign since the days of the Opium War. Many people in Canton adopted an unmistakably pro-West attitude, from popular favourable perceptions of such foreign ‘imperialist enclaves’ as Hong Kong and Shameen to the advocacy for total Westernization by senior academics from a Canton university. Despite its much propagated anti-imperialist stance, the local nationalist government was, in reality, highly conciliatory when dealing with foreign powers.

Although Eliot was principally drawn to Parisian high culture offerings, he also took advantage of being away from home and was also able to immerse himself in the more liberal environment of popular culture. Beginning in about 1905, this type of entertainment grew significantly in popularity because of the reduced working hours of those in the lower classes as well as greater access and improved transportation. The diversity of popular entertainment reflected the new modern urban life as it included several new sights, sounds, and patterns. This chapter reconstructs the complexity of light entertainment through drawing attention to melodramas, music halls, fairs and exhibits, circuses, dance halls, cinema, cabarets-artistiques, and cafés-concerts. Also, focus is given to specific shows and performers and the chapter looks at how these influenced Eliot's critical and literary works.

This chapter, the only one in Part I, first shows how the discourse of both bureaucrats and intellectuals began to recognize “the people” (minshū) as a “social problem” in connection with the rise of capitalism, riots, social movements, and the ideas of “democracy” and “socialism” in the 1910s. It then describes how subsequent discourses promoted the idea of educating “the people” through cinema and other media into a subject that could serve the community, as envisioned in the 1920s by the term “society” (shakai). Here, the idea of “the people” marked the emergence of the social subject in two senses: first, they were “discovered” as an agent exerting an influence on society and afterward were discursively constructed as a subject that was expected to serve “society” or the state: “discussions of popular entertainment” (minshū goraku ron) and “discussions of social education” (shakai kyōiku ron) flourished during this period, promoting a normative concept of the social subject. These discourses saw cinema as a kind of popular entertainment located in the exhibition district rather than as a mechanical medium of reproduction and modeled the view of cinema audiences on idealized images of self-disciplinary male factory workers whose lifestyle consisted of three activities—work, leisure, and sleep—while also feeling that female consumers threatened this norm of spectatorship.

This introductory describes the moral anxiety that prevented many Americans from patronizing popular entertainments in the nineteenth century. The entertainments were regarded so unfavorably that few respectable citizens dared to go out to popular entertainment, and those that did seldom went with regularity. Most people were unwilling, or unable, to imagine containing popular entertainment in its own sphere or to see it as disconnected from their real-life activities, relationships, and morals. In particular, the public seemed convinced that the popular theatre exposed audience members to the possibility of living according to other values. This was the concern that lay behind the assertion, so often made in the early nineteenth century, that the stage was immoral.

This chapter describes the seldom acknowledged cultural impact of Koreana on imperial Japanese popular entertainment. It examines specific examples that were genuinely popular in Japan—folk songs such as “Arirang” and “The Bellflower Song” (“Toraji t'aryŏng”), imagery of kisaeng (courtesan-entertainers), and the choreography of Ch'oe Sŭng-hŭi, one of imperial Japan's most prominent celebrities. Koreana was most popular in Japan at a time when assimilation pressures in the colony itself were becoming more forceful. With the onset of war in China and the Pacific, the colonial regime's highest priority was to knit Koreans more tightly into the fabric of the empire so as to ensure their loyalty and deploy them more effectively for the war effort. This included much tighter censorship of Korean-language media, tougher enforcement of “national language” policies and mandatory shrine visits, and the Name Change (sōshi kaimei) Campaign, which compelled Koreans to adopt Japanese names. There remained, however, a place for what was distinctively Korean, as a charming indicator of the multiplicity of “local colors” that constituted the new cultural order of Japan's empire.

This chapter claims that the entertainment revolution of the 1840s occurred because new types of shows were mounted in new types of playhouses for a new type of spectator. Melodrama and vaudeville became less fashionable and more clearly targeted to a certain kind of customer. Vaudeville, or variety, in particular, had been a saloon entertainment that spectators enjoyed while talking, walking about, eating, and drinking, and it suffered as temperance feeling pushed respectable people—especially genteel women—away from theatres where liquor was served. Paradoxically, the theatrical half-life variety thrived, becoming the first of the new popular entertainments to appeal to spectators (albeit male ones) in all regions and from all classes. In the 1870s and 1880s, it emerged from the saloon to become the engine of mass entertainment.

This chapter presents the The Three Fra Diavolos that opened at Mitchell's Olympic Theatre in 1884. It told the story of three rich young gentlemen who are smitten by three rich young ladies. The Olympic was the first theatre in the city to specialize in comedy: farces, burlesques (or operettas), and trimmed-down versions of comic operas (the Three Fra Diavolos was preceded, for example, by a one-act version of Mozart's La Nozze di Figaro.) The Olympic, a “bandybox temple of Thespis,” spearheaded the theatrical naissance of the 1840s in New York. What its success signaled, to all who paid attention, was the emergence of a new taste for popular entertainment.

Throughout the twentieth century, American Jews were instrumental in the development of the major industries and entertainment forms that provided mass culture to a majority of Americans: Broadway, Hollywood, the television and radio industries, stand-up comedy, and the popular music industry have all been deeply influenced by the activity of Jews. However, this close connection between Jews and entertainment represented a radical departure from traditional Jewish attitudes toward the theater. This chapter explores why, for centuries, Jews were one of the few European cultures without any official public theatrical tradition. It looks at how the particular historical conditions of Jewish modernity in Europe eventually led Jews to become intimately involved with the theater. Finally, it examines the history of interpretation of the biblical story of Jacob and Esau in order to understand the ways in which Jewish thinkers across the ages have responded to the morally ambiguous aspects of theatricality itself, a mode which encompasses both acting on the stage and performance in everyday life.

This chapter sets out the basic principles of a vaudeville show: the types of acts that appeared on the vaudeville stage, their relationships to one another, the kinds of aesthetic claims that performers made about them, and the broader dynamics that existed between performers and their audiences. The implementation of continuous programming, the emergence of the star system, and the integration of the national circuits contributed to a new set of artistic practices and conventions for popular entertainment. The first section focuses on the changes that took place in popular entertainment, as various nineteenth-century forms were incorporated into, and modified within, the vaudeville system. The next section concentrates on how performers accounted for those changes in published articles, interviews, and autobiographies. Finally, there is a discussion of two early and influential studies of vaudeville for what the authors have to say about the broader context for these changes and the kinds of claims that were made to justify them.

Most histories of the phantasmagoria are preoccupied with the relation between its moving pictures and the cinema, and focus on its technology—the ‘real’ that enables its illusions—rather than on the culture that frames it. This chapter argues that gothic fiction conditions the form, content, and reception of the phantasmagoria, which in turn developed early magic-lantern shows to the point where they could repeat for spectators the sense of immersion in a real-unreality experienced by readers of gothic fictions. The chapter focuses on Etienne-Gaspard Robertson's and Paul Philipshal's Phantasmagoria entertainments, on the real-unrealities (the virtual realities) they conjured, and on the astonishment they provoked in audiences. Revising Theodor Adorno's and Terry Castle's influential accounts of the phantasmagoria, its argument leads the reader, in the concluding sections of the chapter, to the unreal-realities of dreams, Romantic explorations of the phantasmagoria projected by the body, and finally the phantasms and nightmares of history.

Although Wordsworth is the most influential poet of the Romantic era, his role in the development of modern concepts of virtuality has yet to be explored. Where Blake hopes to transform the actual by drawing on a virtuality (an open-ended, unstructured potential) that lies beyond it, Wordsworth discovers an analogous potential within the actual itself. This powerful revisioning of the actual is the topic of this chapter, which discusses Wordsworth's ‘Composed on Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ and the ‘Cave of Yordas’ episode in Book VIII of The Prelude. It concludes by turning to romantic accounts of the Brocken Spectre and Aeolian Harp, which it argues are attempts to compose a ‘living theatre’ that, in contrast to popular entertainments such as the phantasmagoria, draws attention to the audience's active role in fabricating the illusions that appear before their eyes.

Hybrid arts and popular amusements emerged in the nineteenth century against a backdrop of global capitalist modernity and the routinization of labor. Traveling circuses, acrobatic outfits from Japan, monkey acts, and freak shows amazed and connected spectators to the wider world. Novel object and puppet theaters, such as sigale-gale in Sumatra and wayang golek in Java, came out of ancient rituals and venerable dramatic traditions to entertain tourists and respond to modern desires for illusionism. A community of forms of popular Malay-language theater, including bangsawan and dulmuluk, developed in western Indonesia starting in the 1870s with the spread of education and printing. In this way, popular literature was disseminated. The bankruptcy of the Mangkunegaran freed up court-trained performers in 1888 to teach the courtly arts and a commercial form of courtly drama, known today as wayang wong panggung, became a veritable craze in western Java.

The final three chapters of this book consider 1851. Firstly I consider the relationship between the Great Exhibition and fairs as highlighted in the texts of broadside ballads, and draw attention to the entertainments on offer beyond Hyde Park at Batty’s Hippodrome and the Great National Fair at Nottinghill. These sources show how, from its very conception, the Great Exhibition contained fair-like elements, and that the fair was therefore a central point of reference in defining that event. Revealing how the fair, and, by extension, the market place was of central concern highlights how cash and commerce haunted the Great Exhibition, which was supposedly an expression of bonds of unity and common interest between bourgeois and worker, Britain and foreign powers. This chapter also considers the way in which working people were actively excluded from both the exhibition and Hyde Park in 1851, resulting in class tensions that official rhetoric around the event successfully submerged, but which is clear in many broadside ballads that take the exhibition as their subject matter.

This chapter traces the journey of the German Theater's founder, Ludwig Ney, from Europe to Paraguay and, ultimately, Argentina. Shifting to Jewish actors, the chapter then reconstructs three Jewish thespian refugees' flights to South America and explores how their work onstage both exposed them to Nazi persecution and facilitated their escapes to an unlikely reunion in Argentina. This discussion emphasizes the interdependency between actors and audiences at theaters in times of crisis, casting dramatic performances as a laboratory for testing survival strategies amid the rise of European fascism. Another focus is the evolution of theater management during the 1930s. Bereft of state subventions, stages were compelled to upend the tradition of cultural theater, adopting instead a market-based approach to repertoire and advertising similar to popular entertainment venues, like the cinema. This controversial model became the blueprint for the Free German Stage in Buenos Aires.

This chapter looks at the development of ballet in the second half of the nineteenth century and the way in which at outer London music halls it became increasingly topical in its subject matter during the period 1870-1884. Many of the references related to the changing political conditions of the day, but the references to situations served more to reassure the audiences than to criticise policy makers. There was always an element of fantasy and escapism about the productions but they also introduced audiences to places of which they may have had little knowledge. London’s dance history, away from the opera houses and the two Leicester Square theatres, is very poorly documented. Ballet in the nineteenth century takes many guises and many dance historians dismiss the post-Romantic period in British theatre as it focused on popular entertainment. Because the available information is so patchy the picture becomes distorted. This chapter starts to investigate just what was music hall ballet and why did it appeal so strongly to its audience.

This chapter focuses on litigation over control of the talent of singers, actors, writers, and others in popular entertainment from 1860 to 1895, which reflected an evolving understanding of the nature of creativity and the role of employment contracts in creating property rights in employee innovation. Creativity and its products became commodities. The scope of intellectual property expanded, especially in the area of copyrights, trade secrets, and trademarks. Markets to sell intellectual property expanded in the growing consumer culture. These developments, combined with the transformation of working conditions and the rise of bureaucratic employment practices associated with factories and the emerging science of management, prompted firms to contract for ownership of employee innovations to an unprecedented degree.

From the 1890s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, and was synonymous with names such as Tony Pastor, B. F. Keith, Al Jolson, Nora Bayes, Bert Williams, William Morris, Eva Tanguay, Harry Houdini, E. F. Albee, Sarah Bernhardt, Sophie Tucker, the Great Sandow, James Corbett, and many others. By 1915 its reach extended across the globe, taking in every continent and performance tradition, and incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its phenomenal success relied on a huge network of theaters, each one part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices, most of which were based in cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Paris. The introduction sets the scene for the chapters that follow, inviting the reader into the darkened theatre to explore this new art form and the people who made it possible.