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Contemporary Cultural Theory

record actually provides very little evidence for the view that
traditional, pre-modern, literate cultures were unitary. The
literary canon was never, in fact, the expression of the spirit of
a ‘people’, but rather the product and possession of an extremely
small and socially exclusive cultural elite. As late as 1839, only
58.4% of those married in Britain were able to sign the marriage
register (Williams, 1965, p. 187): it seems unlikely that many
of this illiterate majority would have had much taste for Meta-
physical poetry.
Truly popular, pre-modern cultures were primarily non-
literate, oral and ‘folkish’, and the record we have of them is often
both imprecise and patchy. That they were significantly differ-
entiated from contemporaneous elite cultures seems, though,
almost certain to be the case. We can be rather more definite about
elite cultures. In pre-modern Europe, these were overwhelmingly
defined, constructed and regulated either by the church or by the
court. If the former had a popular dimension, the latter by and
large did not. And even then, popular Catholicism was very often
distinctly heretical and normally distinctly heterogeneous: it was
never a part of the seamless web of some ideal Christian social
organism. The new, more fully modern cultures of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries—or at least what was distinctively
modern about them—were quintessentially ‘bourgeois’ in form:
democratic, realistic and prosaic. The exemplary instance here is
the rise of the realist novel. Formally democratic though the realist
novel might have been, it was not, however, a truly popular
literary form: in the eighteenth century, the ‘price of a novel...
would feed a family for a week or two’ (Watt, 1957, p. 43).
Throughout the eighteenth century, and across Europe, print runs
were generally still well below 2000; by way of contrast,
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four sold 360,000 copies in the United
States and 50,000 in Britain during its first year of publication in
1949–50 (Febvre & Martin, 1976, p. 220; Crick, 1980, p. 393).

High modernism and mass popular culture
It is only in the late nineteenth century, in fact, that we are able
to observe the more or less simultaneous emergence of the new

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