Middlebrow and Gender, 1890-1945
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 273
ISBN-13: 9789004313361
Subjects: English fiction, women authors; English fiction, history and criticism, 20th century; Women's periodicals; Popular literature, history and criticism; Women in literature; Sex role in literature
Description: Scholars of the middlebrow have demonstrated that the preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot's famous attack on 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' set the tone for the long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction - a controversy which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows. The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the wider dissemination of new concepts of gender. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1945, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues.