Street markets, informality and the performance of London
Street markets, informality and the performance of London
This chapter argues for the longstanding affinity between the market and the theatre, expressed in the frequent elision of festivity with commerce in markets, fairs and carnivals. The chapter utilises Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, and Stallybrass and White’s application of it to cultural transgression. It argues that the street markets were performative places, and picks up earlier analysis of sensory affect in an investigation of the soundscape of the markets. Performance and sound lead into a final section that continues the cultural analysis of the markets and their people commenced in the previous chapter, describing how the costermongers populated the music hall stage, with a voice and look that was distilled (directly or indirectly) from street market origins. It concludes that the street markets existed on stage and in representation in a form that allowed them to be consumed nostalgically into popular culture well beyond the period of this study.
Keywords: performance, Bakhtin, the Carnivalesque, sensory history, music hall, incorporation
Manchester Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
