Cultural Hierarchy In America Research Articles

Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading

Donna Harrington-Leuker, professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, has written a detailed, thoroughly researched overview of the development of summer reading as an American phenomenon, something that most of us simply take for granted today. Utilizing a wide variety of primary documents, including publishers' records, book reviews, diaries and correspondence of readers, and the popular novels of the period themselves, she demonstrates that the concept of “summer reading” was a consequence of the rise of the middle class in the nineteenth century, with the accompanying concepts of summer travel and summer leisure. Of particular note is her consideration of the educated African American elite and the summer resort communities that catered to their needs.The work illuminates the role of nineteenth-century periodicals in marketing summer reading to vacationers and, in particular, to female vacationers, presenting it as a “genteel performance” (41) taking place in a gendered space under the gaze of marriageable males. Harrington-Leuker also reveals the cultural work of the American summer novel, exploring individual authors and titles in depth. She clearly demonstrates how the early American summer novel, set in summer resorts and “ostensibly about summer leisure … became a narrative of self and society at a transitional moment in nineteenth-century culture.” This section is perhaps the least successful, as it requires a familiarity with those authors and titles and she admits herself that most of them have passed into obscurity, Louisa May Alcott being a notable exception. Her “blood-and-thunder tales” are presented as an example of the way that “the season's saturnalian possibilities … remained a part of the public discourse of summer.” Apparently, what happened at the summer resort stayed at the summer resort.Of particular interest to library historians will be the section on the role of space and place in American Victorian summer reading, including as it does descriptions of social and solitary summer reading, and the establishment of libraries at hotels and summer resorts. These include the Athenaeum library at Saratoga and the library at the Poland Spring resort in Maine. Other than a fascinating mention of guests at various resort communities hosting fundraisers for the local public library, there is no consideration of the public library and summer reading, although the public library does appear in many of the diaries and letters that she cites. Rounding out the volume is a chapter on the Chautauqua Assemblies, other summer schools, and the Catholic Reading Circles, which bear witness to the continuing tension between the desire for light, leisurely summer reading, and the cultural pressure for self and social improvement through reading “the best books.”The book is of interest to anyone interested in the social and cultural history of reading in the United States. It fills a gap in the current literature on print culture in nineteenth-century America in regard to popular fiction. While works such as Sarah Wadsworth's In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America and Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America include popular fiction among the topics they explore, Harrington-Leuker's is the only work devoted specifically to popular fiction and to summer reading and to the role of the publisher in that phenomenon. It provides a background to works such as Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture, which focus on popular fiction, book club, and reading groups in the twentieth century. It also creates a need for additional works on summer reading in the nineteenth century that would approach it from different perspectives. Certainly there is room for additional work on African Americans and summer reading, as well as the previously mentioned public library and summer reading, and, of course, for the history of children and their summer reading beyond their participation in library summer reading programs.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the American Stage and Screen by John W. Frick (review)

FRICK, JOHN W. Uncle Toni's Cabin American Stage and Screen. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2012. 308 pp. $100.00. Unlike Sarah Meer's Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in 1850s (2006), John W. Frick's recent study focuses squarely dramatic adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom s Cabin produced in United States from novel's publication as a book in 1852 to roughly 1932. The first and more compelling half of his study analyzes two most influential adaptations of Stowe's (the 1852 George Aiken and H. J. Conway productions) and offers a wealth of historical and biographical detail regarding many theatre venues, entrepreneurs (including P. T. Barnum), managers, playwrights, and actors who brought Stowe's to life for antebellum audiences. For literary scholars, primary benefit of this section is how clearly it contextualizes intersection between Uncle Tom's Cabin and an ascendant theatre genre: moral reform drama. Drawing upon David S. Reynolds's notion of a mixed text (one that articulates contradictory messages and ideological tendencies), Frick shows how success of Uncle Tom s Cabin on both page and stage (18) derived from its investment in such popular entertainments as minstrelsy (the legendary T. D. Rice performed role of Uncle Tom more than one occasion) even as it helped to re-gender and recreate theatre as a bourgeois social space. (Oddly, in this regard, Frick doesn't incorporate Lawrence Levine's important discussion of theatrical sacralization of culture in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America [1990]). Within this cultural context, though, Frick persuasively argues that even Aiken script--the one that hewed most closely to Stowe's antislavery message--significantly undercut her Christian and sentimental rhetoric by excising abolitionist characters that appeared in novel and simplifying those remaining characters most closely associated with indictment of slavery and by treating clinically scenes of great emotion (59). Furthermore, Aiken and subsequently many other playwrights foregrounded male characters of and minimalized stories of Eliza, Tom, Eva, Ophelia, Topsy, and Cassy (reducing Ophelia, for example, to cliched old maid and Topsy to the butt of ridicule in play [60]). The cumulative result, Frick concludes, is that Stowe's was masculinized antebellum even as moral reform drama movement made it respectable for genteel women to attend theatre. …

Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Lawrence Levine. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.

Lawrence Levine. <i>Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.</i>

“The long fetch of history”

TWENTY YEARS AGO, LAWRENCE LEVINE--esteemed cultural historian and winner of MacArthur genius fellowship--described his colleagues' nervous laughter when he classified certain popular entertainers as great artists. Levine asked himself why it mattered so much to distinguish between and and he set out to discover when the categories crystallized in the United States and whose interests they served. The result was Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book zeroes in on mid-nineteenth-century phrenology, which measured cranial dimensions to establish hierarchy of racial types, from the high brows of European Caucasians to the low brows of alien races: Coombs' Popular Phrenology of 186s typically illustrated the domed forehead of Shakespeare against the flat-headed skull of A Cannibal New Zealand Chief (Levine 222). As the century wore on, that distinction was increasingly wielded by class of old stock Anglo-American gentlemen who sought to shore up their privilege in the face of threats posed by galloping immigration, industrialization, and technology. Levine closely documents how this class succeeded in fissuring what had been a rich shared public culture, removing Shakespeare, symphonic music, opera, and the fine arts to pantheon of inaccessible high culture (9). Other scholars of the late-nineteenth-century U. S.--such as Ellen Gruber Garvey, Kathy Peiss, and Richard Ohmann--have traced parallel power relations in struggles between established middle--class book publishers and the makers of mass magazines, in the gendered division of commercialized leisure, and in the commodification of audiences by advertisers. 'The eastern establishment sought both to distance itself from and to control this new mass culture marketplace, and new class alignment--sometimes named the professional-managerial class--emerged. Repeatedly, the cultural categories which crystallized in this period--highbrow/lowbrow, literary/commercial, elite/mass, serious/popular--served to widen the gap between us and them. In period which saw the collapse of Radical Reconstruction, the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, the violent suppression of labour action, and the first wave of women publicly agitating for suffrage, these categories did crucial cultural work. They naturalized the hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and their divisions underwrote other forms of segregation. Some, of course, refused such distinctions and their own relegation within the cultural hierarchy. S. Alice Callahan (Muskogee)--currently identified as the first Native American woman to publish novel, Wynema (1891)-used the popular sentimentalism associated with white middleclass women to launch an excoriating attack on the genocidal policies and practices of the government of the day. In the same period, African-Americans across the country did an end-run on the white monopoly on publishing and distribution, seizing the new tools of mass publishing for their own ends. The Colored Cooperative Publishing Company in Boston, James McGirt in Philadelphia, and Sutton Griggs in Tennessee all produced and marketed popular magazines and books to Black communities, heroizing African-American and mixed-race figures and raging, in their various ways, against racial inequities. Along the fault lines and colour lines of cultural hierarchy, such creative forces marshaled solidarity and resistance. What has all this, an argument from U.S. studies, to do with our position as academics, in Canada, right now? Ohmann argues that mass culture emerged hand in hand with the modern research university, each shaping and serving the other. To simplify his argument: the new universities trained the professional--managerial class which shaped and consumed the new commercial culture which, in turn, helped corporate capitalism to find stability in the economic chaos of the post-bellum U. …

Shakespeare and the American Nation

The combination of Shakespeare and American Studies has recently proven to be fertile ground for scholarly inquiry. In Shakespeare and the American Nation, Kim C. Sturgess shows that the subject has not yet been exhausted. Following the work of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Michael D. Bristol's Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), Sturgess's intriguing book examines how nationalistic appropriations of Shakespeare accorded him the status of a hero in American culture in a climate of strong anti-British sentiment.

Adapting Stella Dallas: Class Boundaries, Consumerism, and Hierarchies of Taste

In her 1961 autobiography, Olive Higgins Prouty reflected that [t]he feature of most interest about Stella Dallas is, I think, number of its reincarnations. First serialized for nearly two million readers of American Magazine in 1922 and published in book form in 1923, Prouty's poignant tale of class hierarchy and maternal sacrifice went on to become a 1924 stage play, a 1925 silent an Oscar-nominated 1937 film starring Barbara Stanwyck, and a long-running radio soap opera. Indeed, Stella outlived her creator, reappearing in a third film starring Bette Midler in 1990. Yet to Prouty these adaptations, filled with melodrama and sentimentality, were something of an embarrassment: How much better if Stella had never emerged from covers of a novel. Certainly adaptation of Stella to stage and screen and finally radio did not help me to acquire kind of reputation I desired (Pencil Shavings 156). It is doubtful, however, that avoiding mass media would have spared Prouty from being, like so many popular and critically acclaimed women novelists of 1920s and 1930s, relegated to dustbins of history by a masculinist, modernist establishment. (1) Arguably, Stella and her creator have been remembered only because of these adaptations: while novel went out of print for nearly four decades, 1937 film remained in circulation and was elevated to canonical status by feminist scholars in 1980s as an exemplary woman's film, a powerful alternative to Hollywood's male gaze. Only since its 1990 reprinting as part of a literary cinema classics series, illustrated with stills from has Prouty's novel gained a modicum of scholarly attention. (2) My concern here is less to establish Prouty in canon than to examine what novel and its reincarnations reveal about evolving discourses of class, taste, and cultural hierarchy in America. The adaptation and reception history of Stella Dallas provide a particularly valuable case study not only because Prouty's comment so clearly exposes intense anxieties centered on boundary lines of literature and mass culture but also because Stella's story is so explicitly and centrally concerned with issues of taste and class distinction. In all versions, Stella Dallas depicts in excruciating detail difficulties faced by a working-class woman who marries above her station. Rather than living happily ever after, in Cinderella fashion, Stella quickly alienates her husband with her flashy dress, coarse manners, and lowbrow tastes, and they separate. Although daughter of this mistaken marriage grows up beautiful and refined, it soon becomes clear that Stella's hopeless vulgarity threatens her daughter's social chances. (3) When Laurel loyally refuses to leave her mother to live with her father and his elegant new wife, Stella drives her away, destroying girl's respect by pretending to love a boorish alcoholic whom Laurel loathes. Stella ends up alone and anonymous, but glowing with maternal pride, standing in a dark, rainy street to glimpse through a distant window spectacle of her daughter's new life (in novel, her debut; in films, her wedding to a wealthy young man). Even after being reunited with her married daughter in radio serial depicting the later episodes in life of Stella Dallas, Stella continued to struggle to reconcile her devotion to Laurel with what program's announcer daily described as the differences in their tastes and worlds. (4) The long popularity of this tale suggests that American mass culture throughout first half of twentieth century--particularly those genres created by and for women--was far more attuned to, even obsessed with, intricacies of class distinctions and barriers than usually acknowledged by our myths of America as a classless society. Yet, as story was repeatedly reinvented in new periods and media, we can observe significant shifts both in ways that class distinctions are defined and in degree of sympathy given to Stella's aspirations. …

High culture, hegemony, and historical causality

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. LAWRENCE W. LEVINE

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Levine. Highbrow, Lowbrow - The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

To this reviewer, Lawrence W. Levine's latest study represents cultural, intellectual, and social history at its best. In the introduction Levine recounts his growing awareness of the fact that the present hierarchical distinction between "highbrow" or "elite" culture and "lowbrow" or "popular" culture is of relatively recent origin, dating only from the tum of the last century. For instance, during most of the nineteenth century Shakespeare was "part and parcel" of a "rich shared public culture." In theaters the Bard was presented, suitably altered to suit local dramatic and moral tastes, to a socially heterogeneous audience who freely expressed their views, verbally and in more physical ways.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (review)

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (review)

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.

Journal Article Lawrence W. Levine. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America Get access Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. By Lawrence W. Levine. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 306. $25.00 cloth. Robert Y. Turner Robert Y. Turner Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 42, Issue 3, Fall 1991, Pages 373–375, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870855 Published: 01 October 1991

Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Book Reviews: A Critical Dictionary of Sociology, A Treatise on Social Theory. Volume II: Substantive Social Theory, Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self, ÉMile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology, Politics and Class Analysis, Choice, Rationality and Social, Social Anthropology and the Politics of Language, The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of

Book Reviews: A Critical Dictionary of Sociology, A Treatise on Social Theory. Volume II: Substantive Social Theory, Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self, ÉMile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology, Politics and Class Analysis, Choice, Rationality and Social, Social Anthropology and the Politics of Language, The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

(1990). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. American Journalism: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 202-203.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America