Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture
RIS ID
78214
Abstract
The study of popular culture has long harbored what can be described as a latent medievalist impulse. Among the cluster of competing definitions of the word "popular" over which scholars have wrestled, there has been one that has taken a longitudinal approach, perceiving "popular culture" to be the authentic expression and repository of "the people," il popolo or das Volk, who have been understood as an historical category. According to the practitioners of this approach, the customs and traditions of these "popular classes" have endured across centuries despite not participating in "official culture." The culture associated with "the people" is deemed popular in the sense that it is produced by them and for their own consumption, expressing their interests and their aesthetics. I am calling this a "medievalist impulse" of popular cultural theory because, as cultural theorists and medievalists have separately argued, its emergence in the nineteenth century is inextricably bound up with the philological, literary, and material recovery of medieval culture.
Publication Details
D'Arcens, L. (2012). Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo and the Left-Modernist Reclamation of Medieval Popular Culture. In G. Ashton & D. T. Kline (Eds.), Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture (pp. 57-70). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.