High and Low Culture

The literature, and particularly, the poetic satire of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century is obsessed with the distinction between high and low art forms, and with shoring up the frontier between genuine literature, and mere ephemeral hack work. It is the period that, critics have argued, sees the invention of the category of ‘literature’: that is, the idea that some select native literary texts could be compared with classical greats. The rest, by implication, would never stand the test of a week, let alone centuries of literary history. Yet it was also a period in which we see the creative exploitation of low cultural forms, literary works whose effect was dependent upon the juxtaposition of high and low within the same text. Read more