Inventing the Popular

In the first study to show that nineteenth-century working-class writers both resisted and contributed to radical transformations in French popular culture, Bettina R. Lerner mines the archives to examine newspapers, poetry, and memoirs of the 1830s and 40s. Far from being imitations of Romantic models, Lerner argues, these works capitalized on changes in the printing industry to promote specific political and poetic agendas among lower- and middle-market consumers.