ABSTRACT
The decline of the worker-poet movement coincides with the success of the mass press in the 1860s as well as with the institutionalization of literary criticism as a discipline dedicated, until recently, to upholding the literary ideals shaped by the European Romantic tradition. The construction of these categories has repeatedly relied on the erasure of practices like those of the worker-poets that operate in the spaces between the high and low. Inventing the Popular concludes by arguing that the study of popular culture is a way of recovering the period’s multiple networks of signifying practices and representational strategies.
