Highbrow
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Highbrow is a colloquial synonym for intellectual or high culture, which draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology. "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition and much of post-bebop jazz; to literature, i.e. literary fiction; to films in the arthouse line, and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate. It can also be used as a noun.
The first recorded usage of the word highbrow was in 1875.
The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow. The term middle-brow has been used to describe culture that was neither high nor low, as used derisively by Virginia Woolf in an unsent letter to the "New Statesman," written in the 1930's and published as a chapter in the book "The Death of a Moth and Other Essays" (1942). According to the OED, the term ‘middlebrow’ first made an appearance in 1925, in Punch: ‘it consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like.’
Recent work by Lawrence Napper Template:Fact has established a distinct middlebrow culture and aesthetic prevalent in Pre and interwar British film. [1] [May 2007]
