What is the History of Popular Culture

It is easier to participate in, to enjoy, to deplore, or to explore popular culture than it is to define it. This is not simply because there are difficulties in relating popular culture to culture (and subcultures) or to folk culture — some of these difficulties are of the historian’s making, particularly the Marxist historian’s — but because of the inherent difficulties in defining ‘culture’ itself. It was not because of his particular political or cultural stance that T. S. Eliot chose to collect ‘notes towards a definition of culture’ rather than to offer a definition of his own.