Ray Browne: Pioneer of Popular Culture

Laura Vivanco

Bowling Green State University announced yesterday that

Dr. Raymond B. Browne, who was instrumental in establishing the first full-fledged department of popular culture in the United States at Bowling Green State University in 1973, died Oct. 22 at home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was 87.

Internationally recognized as a publisher and expert in popular culture, Browne is often credited with coining the term and as being among the first to propose its serious study.

The Browne Popular Culture Library, which bears his name, includes among its many collections

a wide range of romance materials from novels to valentines. The collection includes more than 10,000 volumes of category romance series from publishers such as Harlequin, Silhouette, Loveswept, Candlelight, Ecstasy, and others. The holdings also include a sizable collection of mass market novels, including Georgian, regency, gothic, contemporary, and historicals.

Additional "romantic" items can be found in the Library's various special collections, including large holdings of ephemeral items, such as movie advertisements, posters, and press kits. A unique collection of romance publishing-house book marks and a large selection of valentines from various eras may also be found in the Browne Popular Culture Library.

In addition, the Library has manuscript collections containing correspondence, fan mail, literary manuscripts, and galley sheets from many prominent romance writers, includings Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Cathie Linz, and April Kihlstrom.

The library also holds the "RWA’s organizational archives documenting its founding [...] and following its growth into the world’s largest non-profit genre organization."

According to a "biographical sketch" of Ray Browne provided by the Browne Popular Culture Library

He received his PhD in American literature, folklore and history from UCLA in 1956. He accepted a position in the English department at the University of Maryland. While at Maryland his interest in American Studies expanded after meeting Carl Bode, one of the founders of the American Studies Association. Bode was part of a growing number of scholars who believed that academia needed inter and multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of the humanities and of literature. Browne embraced this view.

After not receiving tenure at the University of Maryland, he assumed a post in the English department at Purdue in 1960. Between 1965 and 1966 he was instrumental in arranging two Purdue conferences intended to broaden the traditionally narrow approach to studying culture. Browne would remain at Purdue until Bowling Green State University offered him a folklore professorship in 1967. In 1968 research facilities began to emerge as the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Library. In 1970 the Popular Press was established. Gradually he introduced a popular culture curriculum into his folklore classes, creating much unpopularity within the English department. This in turn would lead to the establishment in 1971-1972 of a separate Department of Popular Culture at BGSU chaired by Ray Browne. After being away for a year at the University of Maryland, he returned to BGSU in 1976 and remained until his retirement in 1992.

An obituary at CBC News recounts that

"Culture is everything from the food we've always eaten to the clothes we've always worn," he said in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press.

While many in the field credit Browne with coming up the name "popular culture," no one could say for sure whether he originated it. He said he made a mistake in 1967 when he first used the phrase.

"If I had called it everyday culture or democratic culture, it would not have been so sharply criticized," he said.

Initially, as mentioned in another obituary, this time in the Telegraph,

Professors at universities nationwide thought Browne, an English professor, was trying to demean or trivialise what they were teaching when he founded the popular culture department.

But he insisted that interest was genuinely rooted in finding out how society affects culture, and how culture affects society. The concept of popular culture as an object of study has been embraced worldwide, and it is commonly taught as part of a range of university courses.

He was interviewed in 2002 by Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture and

provided us with our most thorough and lasting definition of popular culture:

Popular culture is the way of life in which and by which most people in any society live. [...] It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments, and diversions. It is our heroes, icons, rituals, everyday actions, psychology, and religion — our total life picture. It is the way of living we inherit, practice and modify as we please, and how we do it. It is the dreams we dream while asleep.

Popular Culture and Respect

Laura Vivanco

There's been a vast amount written and debated in the last week about the romance genre and the lack of respect it receives.¹ I'm not planning on re-opening the debate with regards to suitable attire for romance authors because I'm sure anyone who's read all the posts and comments here, here, here and here will (a) have a good idea of the various standpoints on the issue and (b) have eye-strain.

I'd just like to observe that the study of popular culture is relatively new. Back in the late 1960s and 1970s when

Professor Ray B. Browne [...] founded the Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in 1967, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture at BGSU in 1968, the BGSU Popular Press and the Popular Culture Association in 1970, the Department of Popular Culture at BGSU in 1972 (Americana)

it was the case that

To the extent that popular culture was being examined back then, it was through the telescopic lens of history or with the long, cold tongs of the social sciences. But Browne insisted on also looking at contemporary material and applying to it the kind of close, comparative analysis that had previously been reserved for highbrow culture. (Salon)

As Catherine Morland once observed, history could be described as "The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all" (Austen, Mansfield Park). Nowadays, however, historians use a much wider range of source materials and have rewritten histories to include women, children and the lower social classes. This opening up of new areas of research and a new appreciation for previously neglected texts and objects has led to the creation of new collections such as the

Browne Popular Culture Library. The BPCL, founded in 1969 and dedicated to the acquisition and preservation of research materials on American popular culture (post 1876), is the most comprehensive repository of its kind in the United States. (website)

Such collections bring together these otherwise ephemeral resources in order to preserve them and make them accessible for academic study. The online databases at Streetprint.org serve the same purpose. All of them are collections of works of popular culture from chapbooks to street art and from Canada to Eritrea.

Here's a link to a 'penny dreadful',² The Illustrated Family Novelist, from the Revolution and Romanticism database, which contains the short story of A True Woman by Miss Minnie Young. [If you look below the page there's an option to 'view larger image', followed by [+] and [+] and if you click on that larger [+] you can read the text more easily and move forwards through the text using the arrows at the sides of the pages.]

Here's Margaret, our heroine, talking to Dr Harley, her secret admirer, about the song 'The Lorelei' [lyrics by Heinrich Heine (1823) and music by Friedrich Silcher (1789-1860)]:

[Margaret] "I don't think I sympathise very much with the story, or rather with the luckless hero. Wasn't the Lorelei supposed to be soulless?"
[Dr Harley] "Yes"
[Margaret] "And the fisherman flung away his life for such a being?"
[Dr Harley] "He wasn't the first man who has flung away his life for a woman without a soul."
[Margaret] "That is very likely; but I can't sympathise with such a feeling."
[Dr Harley] "He was in love?"
[Margaret] "He was infatuated."
[Dr Harley] "Are they not convertible terms?"
"Certainly not," she spoke with some scorn; and then, seeing the expression on her companion's face - he only spoke thus to try her - she changed her tone. "But some people are so fond of talking as if love and folly were synonymous."
"Because so many people act as if they were. Of course they are not. The highest love is subordinate to reason, to honour, and to duty. When man or woman sweep down these barriers it is generally through the weakness of their principles rather than by the strength of their feelings." (page 5)

Given her views on love and folly I have the impression that Margaret might well disagree with the comment in the Text in Transit: A Guide to Genre in Popular Literature database, in the item on "Comic Romance", to the effect that "Romance and relationships are inherently ridiculous".³

In comparison with history, the study of popular culture, that "vital area of study that offers new insights into our history, beliefs, diversity, emotional make-up, and socio-economic relations" (Portland State University) is still a relatively young discipline but already it has changed (revolutionised?) the way we think about what would once have been termed "low culture". Further study of both the romance genre as a whole and of individual romance novels will, I hope, contribute to a more nuanced approach to the genre, one which acknowledges the diversity of cultures, ideologies, and, yes, levels of literary merit, which are present in this huge and varied genre.

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1 I would like to observe that "respect" is not synonymous with "respectability". The former, according to the OED can mean "a feeling of admiration for someone because of their qualities or achievements" or "due regard for the feelings or rights of others" whereas the respectable is what is "regarded by society as being proper, correct, and good" or is "of some merit or importance".

2 The term "penny dreadful" is not a complimentary one. Romances have suffered from similar labelling problems, with many described as 'bodice-rippers' despite the fact that they contained no descriptions of clothing being shredded. Kathleen Woodiwiss

became known as a pioneer of the "erotic historical" novel. She didn't appreciate it.

"I'm insulted when my books are called erotic," Woodiwiss said in a 1978 interview with Cosmopolitan magazine. "I write love stories, with a little spice." (LA Times)

3 Links to short descriptions of other romance sub-genres covered by the database, and a few examples of covers from each sub-genre, can be found here.

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The painting is of Liberty Guiding the People, by Eugène Delacroix, from Wikipedia. She may perhaps also be considered the embodiment of popular culture. She demands respect, not respectability, and her bodice, while unripped, is revealing. It's a costume which, while suitable for an allegorical figure, would certainly not be considered normal, professional wear for an author.