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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.
This book is made open access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched KU Select 2018: HSS Frontlist Books
This book is made open access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched KU Select 2018: HSS Frontlist Books
This book is included in DOAB.
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Keywords
- English
- Fiction
- France
- French
- KUnlatched
- Languages
- Literary Criticism / European / French
- literary studies
- Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers
- Literature & literary studies
- Literature: history & criticism
- novelists & prose writers
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism::DSK Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Links
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvt1sk8wEditions