High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture.[dubious – discuss] Although it has a longer history in Continental Europe, the term was introduced into English largely with the publication in 1869 of Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, although he most often uses just "culture". Arnold defined culture as "the disinterested endeavour after man's perfection" (Preface) and most famously wrote that having culture meant to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world" - a specifically literary definition, also embracing Philosophy, which is now rather less likely to be considered an essential component of High Culture, at least in the English-speaking cultures. Arnold saw high culture as a force for moral and political good, and in various forms this view remains widespread, though far from uncontested.

The term is contrasted with Popular culture or Mass culture and also with Traditional cultures, but by no means implies hostility to these. T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) was an influential work which saw high culture and popular culture as necessary parts of a complete culture. The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1957) was an influential work along somewhat the same lines, concerned with the cultural experience of those, like himself, who had come from a working-class background before university.

In America, Harold Bloom has taken a more exclusive line in a number of works, as did F. R. Leavis earlier - both, like Arnold, being mainly concerned with literature, and unafraid to champion vociferously the literature of the Western canon.

Similar to 0 things you like: