Customer Reviews

Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Studies in Book and Print Culture)

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Beaty's book is both encouraging and, from this scholar's POV, genuinely challenging to the current scholarship in comics. The focus is on contemporary European comics, in particular the European alternative press, as a field of cultural production. Beaty applies Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about taste, distinction, and cultural capital in an original and provocative way, with far-reaching implications for the study of not only European comics but also comics cultures everywhere, as well as Cultural Studies at large.

The style, though at times unavoidably dense, is fitting to the subject and generally quite accessible; more important, the range of examples and depth of analysis is startling. Here is truly a new lens for the study of comics production, and a wonderful map, by the way, to genres of European comics hitherto unstudied in English. English-language scholarship will have to engage European comics from a different angle from now on!