Research Catalog

Title

High culture, popular culture : the long debate / Peter Goodall.

Author

Goodall, Peter

Publication

St. Leonards, NSW : Allen & Unwin, 1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xx, 204 p.; 22 cm.

Summary

In this provocative analysis, Goodall challenges the current dominance of the contemporary and the popular in cultural studies. He argues that culture should be treated as an historical term, and traces the debate between high culture and popular culture in industrialised society from the 18th century to the present day. Goodall then locates the debate in Australia, arguing that it is of particular relevance to a postcolonial society. More than any other modern culture, Australia has sought its identity in its sense of struggle between populism and elitism. Finally, Goodall broaches the contentious topic of the relationship between the 'new' cultural studies and the 'old' humanities. Rather than simply defending one and denigrating the other, he points the way to a more productive relationship.

Series Statement

Australian cultural studies

Uniform Title

Australian cultural studies

Subject

• 1900-1999
• Popular culture > Australia
• Arts, Australian
• Arts, Modern > 20th century > Australia
• Mass media > Australia
• Australia > Intellectual life > 20th century

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-190) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: from high culture to beer culture -- Culture and cultures -- Sacred sites and unvisited graves -- Coincidence of opposites: overview of the book -- A renovated 'English' -- 1. 'A pursuit of our total perfection': theories of culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The emergence of the debate about high culture and popular culture. Aesthetics, art and culture. Industrialism and the division of culture. Victorian views of 'culture'. Culture for the many or for the few? -- 2. Twentieth-century theories of high culture and mass culture. The era of mass society and the decay of culture. British writing about culture in the 1920s and 1930s. The critique of mass culture from both political right and left. Modernist definitions of high art, literariness, and the 'classic'. The status of the text as a function of social process. Modernist accommodations to the technology of mass culture. Status and stratification in the analysis of culture.

ISBN

1863738339

LCCN

^^^95216641^

OCLC

• 33942157
• SCSB-11523687

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library