Print Culture and Distribution

'Late age of print' term comes from the media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Gutenberg's printing press.
The 'age of print' began around 1450.

John Martin (1820) reproduced his own work using print and began to become richer as his work became more expensive.

Matthew Arnold (1867) 'Culture & Anarchy' Culture is:
- 'The best that has been thought and said in the world'.
- Study of perfection.
- Attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking.
- The pursuit of culture.
- Seeks 'to minister the diseased spirit of out time'.
Culture - rich people.
Anarchy - working class people taking over.
The working class 'raw and half developed'.

Leavisism - F.R. Leavis & Q.D. Leavis
Mass Civilisation & Minority Culture
Fiction and the Reading Public

Culture and Environment.

Standardisation and leveling down.

Collapse of the traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy (anarchy).

Nostalgia for an era when the masses exhibited an unquestioning deference to (culture) authority.

Popular culture offers addictive forms of distraction and compensation. C19th. Penny Dreadful.

Walter Benjamin 'The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production' 1936.

Art is a cult.

Print Capitalism 1842.

William Morris (1877) 'The Lesser Arts'
Mechanical vs. Intellectual.