So far as studies of cultural history are concerned, the concept of ‘revolution’ has been somewhat peripheral, employed for the most part as little more than a synonym for ‘watershed’ or ‘turning-point’. In spite – or because – of events in China in 1966, the phrase ‘cultural revolution’ has found little favour with historians. All the same, the problems of change and continuity have been discussed in a lively and interesting way with reference to popular culture since its discovery by historians some twenty years ago. It may be useful to distinguish three approaches to the subject, three traditions of analysis which started out from very different premises, even if they have since come to merge, or at least to penetrate one another. The first of these traditions emphasizes the media through which popular culture has been transmitted; the second, the society in which it has been transmitted; and the third, the history of that transmission over the long term.

I THE MEDIA AND THE CRITICS

The twentieth century has witnessed many denunciations of popular culture, or, as it was more commonly known from the 1930S to the 1960s, ‘mass culture’. These denunciations, which generally came from literary critics, such as F. R. Leavis, rested on a simple view of historical development, whether or not this view was made explicit. The past was presented as a Golden Age, the age of the ‘organic community’ and of ‘folk art’. As one critic put it, ‘Folk Art grew from below’, while ‘Mass Culture is imposed from above’ it is ‘an article for mass consumption, like chewing gum’. The new ‘mass art’, said another, provides ‘invitations to a candy-floss world’ and ‘sex in shiny packets’, in place of the old order's ‘real world of people’. ‘Much of what applies to the production of goods’, a third critic declared, 'is true also of the mass media … Quantity becomes more important than quality … What is presented must be “safe”, unprovocative and generally acceptable.