The Making of Middle-Brow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) 1992. Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. The Tastemakers (New York: Harper and Row) 1954.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press) 1988. Richardson and Allen Simkus, 'How musical taste groups mark occupational status groups' pp 152–68. Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1992. Lamont, Michèle and Marcel Fournier, editors.Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace) 1949. Kern, 'Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore' American Sociological Review 61.5 (October 1996), pp. 900–907. ^ Quoted in Micki McGee, Yaddo: Making American Culture, :106: McGee outlines the history of the highbrow/lowbrow debate.At first the term was complimentary, but 'highbrow' came to be at best a neutral word.' 'New York Sun reporter Will Irvin popularized 'highbrow,' and its opposite 'lowbrow' in 1902, basing his creation on the wrongful notion that people with high foreheads have bigger brains and are more intelligent and intellectual than those with low foreheads. The theory, later discredited, led to the expression 'highbrow' for an intellectual, which is first recorded in 1875.' Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), founder of the 'science' of phrenology, gave support to the old folk notion that people with big foreheads have more brains. The three genres of fiction, as American readers approached them in the 1950s and as obscenity law differentially judged them, are the subject of Ruth Pirsig Wood, Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels, 1995. It was popularized by the American writer and poet Margaret Widdemer, whose essay 'Message and Middlebrow' appeared in the Review of Literature in 1933. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like'. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch: 'The BBC claims to have discovered a new type - 'the middlebrow'. The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low as a usage, middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads. The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. Levine, 'Prologue', Highbrow/lowbrow: the emergence of cultural hierarchy in America, 1990:3 highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: 'We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres- opera and classical' (Tak Wing Chan, Social Status and Cultural Consumption 2010:60). The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discriminatory or overly selective (Lawrence W. literary fiction and poetry to films in the arthouse line and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. 'Highbrow' can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition and literature, i.e. The word draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, and was originally simply a physical descriptor. Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, highbrow is synonymous with intellectual as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. Philip Melanchthon, engraving by Albrecht Dürer, 1526

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