ABSTRACT
Literature always gets there first. As Perry Meisel has argued in The Myth of Popular Culture any study of popular culture ‘should really begin with Dante. Literary history, much earlier than scientific history, invents all the categories for the origins of low and high as ideas’. 1 It may well be the case that distinctions between high and low (popular) culture are exacerbated in the twentieth century, with the advent of mass popular culture produced for and consumed by a working class that had more leisure time than they had had previously, but the division pre-dated the explosion of popular cultural forms of relatively recent times. We do not need the music hall, comic books, Elvis Presley, television, the World Series, blue jeans or internet pornography to enable us to find distinctions between the lofty and the quotidian.
