![]() ![]() These measures became an indicator of ‘highbrow-ness’ or ‘lowbrow-ness’. The study found that borrowing patterns revealed seven general categories of fictionĬategories were assigned a level of ‘legitimacy’ according to whether the authors in them were in the school curriculum or had won a major domestic literary prize or the Nobel Prize. This study just looked at books borrowed by readers aged over 20, to avoid having the findings skewed by educational demands. The library system held data on ‘the gender, year of birth, education completed, general employment status (using the categories pre-school, school pupil, student at vocational school, university student, manual worker, non-manual worker, unemployed, retired) and occupation of a reader’. ![]() The study is based on books and their usage rather than the preferences of individuals Additionally, they saw that 'the strongest cultural boundaries exist between different less privileged groups rather than between privileged and non-privileged ones'. ![]() The researchers took data from the city's public library network to show that highbrow categories of books are preferred by highly educated readers of all ages and genders, whereas lowbrow categories of books tend to have more segregated groups of readers, either by age or gender. This paper examined data from public libraries in St Petersburg, Russia, to identify whether or not an ‘omnivorous’ reading habit is only associated with people in elite or privileged status groups. In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.This research was conducted by Mikhail Sokolov and Nadezhda Sokolova at European University at Saint Petersburg, Russia Summary Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period-and many have still not regained-their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit." "If there is a tragedy in this development," Lawrence Levine comments, "it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. A growing chasm between "serious" and "popular," between "high" and "low" culture came to dominate America's expressive arts. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. The theater, once a microcosm of America-housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy-now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.įor most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms-Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow-enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity.
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