![]() ![]() It's hard to imagine that a riot, with the loss of twenty-two lives, could have been caused by an audience outraged by a Shakespearean actor's style. Levine's vivid examples of Shakespeare's presence in nineteenth-century American culture remind us that audiences booed, hissed, and assaulted those actors who cut songs or scenes they expected. The strongest part of the book describes the process of bifurcation. By the end of the century, one needed to be educated to these higher forms, be taught the rules of polite behavior, and visit special temples to encounter "culture." To demonstrate the emergence of cultural hierarchy, Levine divides his argument into four parts: the example of Shakespeare, the "sacralization of culture" in other arts, an historical explanation ofthe bifurcation, and anepilogueconnectingnineteenth-centuryhistory to contemporary arguments by Bloom and Bennett about the decline ofculture. 81) as part of "die sacralization ofculture," whereby opera, symphonic music, and fine arts became "culture" separate from the masses. Levine sees this "transformation of Shakespeare" (p. ![]() No longer did the theatre hold a microcosm of socioeconomic groups sharing a diverse culture. To explain Shakespeare's elevation, Levine focuses on the process by which audiences were segregated into separate spaces where they encountered different types of entertainment, a process that during the last decades of the century divorced Shakespeare from everyday culture. ![]() If Shakespeare was a part of popular culture (so much so that Twain could parody Shakespeare in the Duke and the Dauphin's scams in Huckleberry Finn), Levine questions "our tendency to see culture on a vertical plane, neady divided into a hierarchy of. 23) in theatres attended by diverse audiences. According to Levine, in nineteenth-century America Shakespeare was not a literary classic accessible only to the educated, but part of a "shared culture" in which scenes from Shakespeare shared the stage with "magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics" (p. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1988, $25.00 cloth, $12.95 paper. She can be reached at or 73.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ġ44Philosophy and Literature Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence ofCultural Hierarchy in America, by Lawrence W. McMurray-Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University, Dr. Lowbrow, Middlebrow, Highbrow and Ink and Electricity are sponsored by the Wayne D. But following the second talk in the series by Skidmore College professor Janet Casey in spring 2017 on “Readers as Writers in American Periodicals, 1900-1940,” Monmouth strengthened its claim to being a hub for serious study of popular arts-the arts that have engrossed, thrilled, and delighted readers for over a century. Popular literature like this is often maligned by academics as “lowbrow” or “middlebrow,” while “highbrow” art and literature are supposed to be the stuff of university life. Macdonald’s talk explored the ways Buchan’s popular novel (which was adapted into a play for radio, stage, and film) impacted society, politics, and even the shape of the British empire. Focused on the writer of the famous adventure mystery, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Dr. Her talk was titled “The Scots Are Invading: John Buchan’s Version of How Scotland Conquered the World,” and it set the stage for the series talks to follow. ![]() In April 2016, Kate Macdonald of the University of Reading delivered the first lecture in a series on cultural hierarchies in the arts and literature. ![]()
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