Middlebrow Matters
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Place of publication: Liverpool
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781786941565; 9781786949523
Subjects: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers
Description: 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.
Notes: Knowledge Unlatched 102590 KU Select 2018: HSS Frontlist Books

English.