The “Invention” of Popular Culture and the Inside/Outside of Professionalism : An Intellectual-Historical Reappraisal of Barry J. Faulk’s Music Hall & Modernity

Abstract

This article offers an intellectual-historical reappraisal of Barry J. Faulk’s Music Hall & Modernity (2004), critically examining how the discursive infrastructure of modernity surrounding the late-Victorian music hall absorbed the autonomous public sphere of the working class. To this end, this article extends Faulk’s thesis on the “invention of popular culture” along two dimensions. Firstly, focusing on the 1894 Empire Theatre licensing controversy, it reconstructs the “antagonistic complicity” between the moral reformer Laura O. Chant and the aestheticist critic Arthur Symons through the lens of the patriarchal gaze. Secondly, mediated by feminist historiography, it traces the bodily performativity of Marie Lloyd, the “queen of the music hall,” and the posthumous aesthetic recapture of her legacy. Ultimately, this article reveals that surveillance and aestheticization functioned as the twin wings of a single project of modernity. By repositioning the late-Victorian music hall as an “epistemological colony,” this study opens up new intellectual-historical possibilities for intersecting Faulk’s analytical framework with Korean scholarship on late-Victorian cultural history, women’s history, and colonial modernity