Description
Book SynopsisThe literary ''middle ground'', once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters . These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the ''battle of the brows'', and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.
Trade Review"It is fitting . . . that Faye Hammill should bring Middlebrow Literary Cultures to a close in an Afterword where she quotes from
Raymond Williams's Culture and Society, 1780 1950 (1958): 'There are in fact no middlebrows; there are only ways of seeing people and books as middlebrow' (p. 300). Middlebrow Literary Cultures is a stimulating and scholarly addition to this long-running debate, and an indispensable extension to our continuing enquiries into the complications and vagaries of critical reception." - Cambridge Quarterly 2013
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Middlebrow Matters; E.Brown & M.Grover PART I: CULTURAL CONTEXTS Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy; J.G.Casey Configuring Middleness: Bourdieu, le Art Moyen, and the Broad-Brow; C.Pollentier PART II: TASTE-MAKERS AND PRINT CULTURES I: UK Cultural Hierarchies and the Inter-War British Press; A.Bingham Priestley and the Highbrows; J.Baxendale Aesthetics for Everyman: Arnold Bennett's Evening Standard Columns; J.Shapcott 'A Strongly Felt Need': Wilfred Whitten/John O'London and the Rise of the New Reading Public; J.Wild II: US The Excluded Middle: Cultural Polemics and Magazines in America, 1915-1933; V.Kingham 'Intellectual in its looser sense': Reading Mencken's Smart Set; S.Hamilton Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority, and Autonomous Readers in Postwar America: James Gould Cozzens, Dwight Macdonald, and By Love Possessed; J.S.Rubin PART III: CATEGORISATION AND VALUATION The Returning Reader: Serial Middlebrow and Mazo de la Roche's Jalna Novels; C.Rifkind Illustrating Mary Poppins: Visual Culture and the Middlebrow; K.Bluemel Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project; N.Hubble The Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow; N.Humble Afterword; F.Hammill Index
