Synopses & Reviews
Who was the early twentieth-century masculine middlebrow reader? How did his reading choices respond to his environment? This book looks at British middlebrow writing and reading from the late Victorian period to the 1950s and examines the masculine reader and author, and how they challenged feminine middlebrow and literary modernism.
Review
"This is a superb and much-needed collection of essays, which proves that 'middlebrow' is not necessarily 'feminine'. It greatly enriches our understanding of middlebrow cultural production by its attention to journalism and periodical culture, anthologies and education, politics and colonial contexts. The line-up of contributors is remarkably fine, and their work demonstrates a wide range of possible approaches to the study of the middlebrow." - Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, AHRC Middlebrow Network leader
Review
"Both forceful and elegant, the essays in this collection evince the myriad ways in which middlebrow readers found radical, challenging ideas at every turn. And, perhaps more importantly, they sketch out how popular reading tastes played a central role in establishing new male identities for an expanding middle class in a world reshaped by industrialization, world wars, universal education and female suffrage. In allowing us a glimpse of this process, The Masculine Middlebrow encourages a reappraisal of some fundamental assumptions about the past hundred years of British literature." - Edward White, TLS
"This is a superb and much-needed collection of essays, which proves that 'middlebrow' is not necessarily 'feminine'. It greatly enriches our understanding of middlebrow cultural production by its attention to journalism and periodical culture, anthologies and education, politics and colonial contexts. The line-up of contributors is remarkably fine, and their work demonstrates a wide range of possible approaches to the study of the middlebrow." - Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, AHRC Middlebrow Network leader
About the Author
KATE MACDONALD is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Ghent, Belgium, where she teaches British literature and culture. She has published chapters and articles on late Victorian and Edwardian book history and publishing culture, and is the author and editor of books on John Buchan.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction: Identifying the Middlebrow, the Masculine and Mr Miniver; K.Macdonald
Reading Class, Examining Men: Anthologies, Education, and Literary Cultures; S.McPherson
The Evolution of the Masculine Middlebrow: Gissing, Bennett, Priestley; C.E.Hill
'Watching the Papers daily in Fear and Trembling': the Boer War and the Invention of Masculine Middlebrow Literary Culture; J.Wild
Professionalism and the Cultural Politics of Work in the Sherlock Holmes stories; C.Clarke
From Holmes to the Drones: Fantasies of Men without Women in the Masculine Middlebrow; N.Humble
Healing Landscapes and evolving Nationalism in interwar Canadian Middlebrow Fiction of the First World War; A.Tector
'Everybody's Essayist': on Middles and Middlebrows; C.Pollentier
Modernity and the Gendering of Middlebrow Book Culture in Australia; D.Carter
'Mind's Middle Distances': Men of Letters in interwar New Zealand; C.Hilliard
The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell; A.Vaninskaya
'The Collaborator, the Tyrant, and the Resistance': The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and Masculine Middlebrow England in the Second World War; A.Rea
Bibliography
Index