Search Terms
In addition to adding country names to your subject searches, use the following geographic terms to narrow your searches (e.g. Popular Culture -- Europe)
- Europe
- European Union Countries
- Europe, Central
- Europe, Eastern
- Europe, Western
- Europe, Northern
- Europe, Southern
- Scandinavia
- Balkan Peninsula
- Iberian Peninsula
- British Isles
- Great Britain (use for United Kingdom)
- Mediterranean Region
To specify linguistic areas, use the following formula:
- Europe, [language]-speaking (e.g. Europe, French-speaking)
General Resources
Journals:
- European Journal of Cultural Studies Topic areas include (among others): popular cultural forms and practices; music; consumer cultures; media, film and television culture; post-colonial criticism; cultural policy; citizenship, sexualities, youth culture and class relations; intersectional constructions of identity; populism; creative industries. --Publisher
Books:
Protest, Popular Culture and Tradition in Modern and Contemporary Western Europe by
Mock funerals, effigy parading, smearing with eggs and tomatoes, pot-banging and Carnival street theatre, arson and ransacking: all these seemingly archaic forms of action have been regular features of modern European protest, from the 19th to the 21st century. In a wide chronological and geographical framework, this book analyses the uses, meanings, functions and reactivations of folk imagery, behaviour and language in modern collective action.
ISBN: 9781137507365Publication Date: 2017-04-18
Not Like Us by
Debunking the myth of the 'Americanisation' of Europe, Pells presents an engrossing cultural history of how America tried to remake Europe in its own image, and how the Europeans successfully retained their own identity.
ISBN: 0465001645Publication Date: 1997-03-01
Generation X Rocks by
Essays in this volume explore the popular cultural effects of rock culture on high literary production in Spain in the 1990s.
ISBN: 0826515649Publication Date: 2007-06-18
"There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same." --Criterion Collection
Watch the whole film on Kanopy, and explore European film in the Library catalog.
- Watch online: European and Baltic Studies on KanopyAccess streaming feature films and documentaries from Europe.
LibGuides:
Search Terms:
Try the following keywords in the catalog and article databases to find materials on European film:
- German Expressionism (1920s film movement)
- Italian Neorealism (post-WWII film movement in Italy focusing on postwar challenges faced by everyday people)
- French New Wave Cinema (highly influential art cinema movement of the 1950s and 60s)
- German New Wave or New German Cinema (German art cinema movement influenced by the French New Wave)
- British New Wave (also drew on the French movement)
- Czechoslovak New Wave (active in the 1960s)
- Polish film school (1950s and 60s)
- Spaghetti Westerns or Euro-Westerns (refers to films produced in Europe, primarily in Italy, that adapted the tropes of the American Western)
Books on European Film:
East, West and Centre by ISBN: 9780748694150Publication Date: 2015-01-01In East West and Centre the world's leading scholars in the field assemble to consider the ways in which notions such as East and West, national and transnational, central and marginal are being rethought and reframed in contemporary European cinema.
The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry by ISBN: 9781138790056Publication Date: 2016-12-02The Rise and Fall of the Italian Film Industry traces the rise of the industry from its origins in the 19th century to its worldwide success in the 1960s, and its rapid decline in the subsequent decades. It does so by looking at cinema as an institution - subject to the interplay between the spheres of art, business, and politics at the national and international level.
Any Gun Can Play by ISBN: 9781903254615Publication Date: 2011-05-10Sergio Leone's famed Dollars trilogy sparked a gold-rush, as a legion of European film-makers went on to make in excess of 600 Westerns in just 10 years. Massively popular, stylish and baroque, Euro-Westerns became box-office sensations around the world and their influence can still be felt today. Any Gun Can Play spotlights the many actors, directors and poster artists who changed the look of the Western and dragged it into the modern age.
Euro-Visions by ISBN: 9781628923018Publication Date: 2016-09-22European cinema not only occupies a dominant place in film history, it is also a field that has been raising more interest with the expanding work on the transnational. Euro-Visions asks what idea of Europe emerges, is represented and constructed by contemporary European film.
The Library has nearly 3,000 British television titles in its collection, from sitcoms to sci-fi to documentaries. Use the filters at the right to browse, and use the subject search term "television programs" + country or language to find other information on television in the European Union. To find DVDs and streaming video, choose "movie" as your format in the filters to the right. The books below will get you started on research on European television.
British Science Fiction Television by ISBN: 1845110471Publication Date: 2006-01-06This volume argues that British science fiction television, too often in the past critically derided for the quality of its special effects compared to American equivalents such as Star Trek--deserves to be taken seriously as a legitimate object of cultural analysis, both in terms of its ambition and ideas and its value in illuminating wider aspects of recent social and cultural history.
British Television Drama by ISBN: 9781844576234Publication Date: 2015-04-23This widely-respected history of British television drama is an indispensable guide to the significant developments in the area; from its beginnings on the BBC in the 1930s and 40s to its position in the twenty-first century, as television enters a multichannel digital era.
Europe Un-Imagined: nation and culture at a French-German television channel by ISBN: 1442628790Publication Date: 2017Europe Un-Imagined examines one of the world's first and only trans nationally produced television channels, Association relative à la télévision européenne (ARTE). Damien Stankiewicz's ground-breaking ethnographic study of the various contexts of media production work at ARTE (the newsroom, the editing studio, the screening room), reveals how ideas about French, German, and European culture coalesce and circulate at the channel.
Television in Spain by ISBN: 1855661365Publication Date: 2006-11-21This book, the first of its kind, gives close readings of TV programmes broadcast from the 1970s to the present day. In addition to analysing particular programmes, this book examines TV channels, production companies, governments, and the role of the press, academy, and audience.
Italian TV Drama and Beyond by ISBN: 1841504599Publication Date: 2012-05-15Since its inception in the mid-1950s, the television drama has emerged as the dominant medium of contemporary storytelling in Italian society, with a steadily increasing supply of locally produced domestic dramas offering up competing versions of Italian identity. Informed by the nation's rich historical and cultural heritage--as well as a string of notable foreign imports--the narratives discussed here offer much insight into Italian society and highlight the wide array of television programming available outside of Britain and the United States.
- EurocrimeA resource for fans of British and European crime fiction and crime fiction in translation.
- Scandinavian Studies Guide: LiteratureIncludes links in the pop-up menu to pages on Scandinavian sagas, crime fiction, and children's literature.
Long before American Idol, there was Eurovision--begun in 1956, it's the longest running music contest in the world and among the most-watched non-sporting events internationally, attracting 204 million viewers in 2016. You can watch past livestreams and music videos on the Eurovision YouTube Channel.
Learn more about Eurovision:
Empire of Song by ISBN: 9780810886995Publication Date: 2013-07-11In Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, contributors interpret the ESC as a musical "mediascape" and mega-event that has variously performed and performs the changing visions of the European project. Through the study of the cultural politics of the ESC, contributors discuss the ways in which music operates as a dynamic nexus for making national identities and European sensibilities, generating processes of "assimilation" or "integration," and defining the celebrated notion of the "European citizen" in a global context.
Performing the 'New' Europe by ISBN: 023029992XPublication Date: 2013-05-13This fascinating and lively volume makes the case that the Eurovision Song Contest is an arena for European identification in which both national solidarity and participation in a European identity are confirmed, and a site where cultural struggles over the meanings, frontiers and limits of Europe are enacted.
More resources:
Hip Hop at Europe's Edge by ISBN: 0253022738Publication Date: 2017-03-27Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes locally inflected.
Jazz and the Germans by ISBN: 9781576470725Publication Date: 2002-01-01Twelve essays focus on American jazz influences in Germany, where this musical expression was popular for much of the past century both in popular culture and in the arts realm.
Heavy Metal Music in Britain by ISBN: 0754664236Publication Date: 2009-03-28This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British heavy metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British heavy metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analyses of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances.
Flip the Script by ISBN: 9780226496184Publication Date: 2017-10-23Flip the Script offers a close look at the role of hip hop in Europe, where it has become a politically powerful and commercially successful form of expression for the children and grandchildren of immigrants from former colonies. Through analysis of recorded music and other media, as well as interviews and fieldwork with hip hop communities, J. Griffith Rollefson shows how this music created by black Americans is deployed by Senegalese Parisians, Turkish Berliners, and South Asian Londoners to both differentiate themselves from and relate themselves to the dominant culture.
A wide variety of sports are popular across Europe, from football (soccer), cricket, and rugby to tennis and cycling. The books highlighted below explore European sport in its broader context globally and on the continent. To find library resources on European sports, experiment with using specific sports and countries in your search terms (e.g., Cricket -- Great Britain).
Image: By Adrià garcía (Flickr) CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
- Eurosport.comWatch games and follow the latest news in the European sports world.
- Book series: European Sports History ReviewTitles in this series cover the role of class, gender, nation and politics in European sport.
Sport and the Transformation of Modern Europe by ISBN: 9780415592222Publication Date: 2011-09-19In this fascinating, inter-disciplinary study, leading international scholars explore the making of modern sport in Europe, illuminating sport and its cultural and economic impacts in the context of the supra-state formations and global markets that have re-shaped national and trans-national cultures in the later twentieth century. The book focuses on the emergence and expansion of media markets, high-performance sport's transformation by, and effects upon, Cold War dynamics and relations, and the implications of the Treaty of Rome for an emerging European identity in sport.
Globalising Women's Football by ISBN: 3034313152Publication Date: 2013-07-11With an estimated 26 million female players globally (6 million based in Europe), the evolution of football has been dramatic. Growth in the women's game has led to more widespread player migration as new forms of professionalism emerge. This work explores those patterns of movement into, and out of, Europe using new archival evidence and player interviews.
Sport, Media and Regional Identity by ISBN: 1443881104Publication Date: 2015-12-15The increasing potency of identity politics across Europe often sees sport acting as a vehicle for the promotion and celebration of regional and sub-national identities. This book considers the centrality and cultural significance of particular sports, or clubs, to regional and sub-national identities across Europe and beyond, adopting a comparative approach to the mediatized nature of such portrayals.
The long-running French comic series Astérix and Obélix (first published in 1959) has been translated into over 100 languages and distributed around the world. The Library has about 20 titles, mostly in French. Visit the official site for information about more titles and translations.
Library and Web Resources:
- Europe ComicsA digital imprint featuring European comics in English from 13 countries.
Books on European Comics:
Unpopular Culture by ISBN: 9780802091338Publication Date: 2007-02-03Unpopular Culture addresses the transformation of the status of the comic book in Europe since 1990. Increasingly, comic book artists seek to render a traditionally degraded aspect of popular culture un-popular, transforming it through the adoption of values borrowed from the field of 'high art.' The first English-language book to explore these issues, Unpopular Culture represents a challenge to received histories of art and popular culture that downplay significant historical anomalies in favour of more conventional narratives
British Comics by ISBN: 9781861898555Publication Date: 2011-12-01In this entertaining cultural history of British comic papers and magazines, James Chapman shows how comics were transformed in the early twentieth century from adult amusement to imaginative reading matter for children.
Comic Art of Europe Through 2000 by ISBN: 9780275982195Publication Date: 2003-08-30A unique and thorough reference work Comic Art of Europe through 2000: An International Bibliography chronicles in two volumes the development of comic art in Europe and reflects the burgeoning amount of literature on the subject. The author gathers in one place an exhaustive collection of literature dealing with all aspects of comics, cartooning, and animation in Europe. Organized by categories of country, genre, approaches, and other aspects, these multi-language bibliographies are compiled and organized for easy reference use.
Hip Hop Tuga
Portuguese hip hop ("tuga" is slang for Portuguese) has a strong presence the Portugal's music scene. Learn more about the history of hip hop tuga and the current scene and listen below.
- Hip Hop Tuga (in Portuguese)News, interviews with artists, concert information, and free mixtape downloads.
- Hip-Hop Tuga: The History Of Portuguese Hip-HopPart 1 of a 2-part series, this article looks at the emergence of hip hop in Portugal in the 1980s, with videos and discussion of popular artists. Click through to the second part at the bottom of the page.
