Middlebrow Matters
Diana Holmes · 2018
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About the book
Middlebrow is a derogatory word that connotes blandness, mediocrity and a failed aspiration to ?high? culture. However, when appropriated as a positive term to denote that wide swathe of literature between the challenging experimentalism of the high and the formulaic drive of the popular, it enables a rethinking of the literary canon from the point of view of what most readers actually read, a criterion curiously absent from dominant definitions of literary value. Since women have long formed a majority of the nation?s reading public, this perspective immediately feminises what has always been a very male canon. Opening with a theorisation of the concept of middlebrow that mounts a defence of some literary qualities disdained by modernism, the book then focuses on a series of case studies of periods (the Belle Époque, inter-war, early twenty-first century), authors (including Colette, Irène Nemirovsky, Françoise Sagan, Anna Gavalda) and the middlebrow nature of literary prizes.
Book details
- Year
- 2018
- Language
- English
- Publisher
- Liverpool University Press
- Editions
- 1
- Pages
- 244
- ISBN
- 9781786941565
Data source: Wikidata
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