Cultural Displacement

Abstract

One way for a periodical to secure an elite cultural zone was to resort to the traditional “high” cultural forms, genres, and themes that signaled “refinement” and “good taste,” a strategy that was suffused with paradox. The move to create absolute hierarchical categories produced an imaginary nation in which mundane and tawdry material concerns could be ignored and transcended for higher ground and in which the legacy of Western art and culture was sustained and naturalized. The emergence of such a cultural hierarchy in America has been thoroughly examined in Lawrence Levine’s history of the division into “highbrow” and “lowbrow” or “serious” and “popular,” distinctions, which, significantly, were derived from the phrenological terms used in the practice of determining racial types (222). The periodicals and the plays in them certainly were instrumental in promoting and maintaining the boundaries between “high” and “low.” For instance, given that for centuries throughout Europe verse was accepted as the “natural” medium for serious drama, it is not surprising that many of the serious plays in periodicals are in verse and that many of the verse plays are serious; claims to “high” culture were made by writing plays in elevated language and/or with a classical, historical, or Biblical theme.