Synopses & Reviews
The literary "middle ground," once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters. These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the "battle of the brows," and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.
Review
"It is fitting . . . that Faye Hammill should bring Middlebrow Literary Cultures to a close in an Afterword where she quotes from Raymond Williams's Culture and Society, 1780 - 1950 (1958): 'There are in fact no middlebrows; there are only ways of seeing people and books as middlebrow' (p. 300). Middlebrow Literary Cultures is a stimulating and scholarly addition to this long-running debate, and an indispensable extension to our continuing enquiries into the complications and vagaries of critical reception." - Cambridge Quarterly 2013
Synopsis
This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.
About the Author
ERICA BROWN is Associate Lecturer in the Department of English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, and Administrator and Web Manager of the AHRC-funded Middlebrow Research Network.
MARY GROVER Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the author of The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (2009) and a founder of Sheffield Hallam University's special collection of popular fiction, 'Readerships and Literary Cultures, 1900-1950'.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Middlebrow Matters; E.Brown& M.Grover
PART I: CULTURAL CONTEXTS
Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy; J.G.Casey
Configuring Middleness: Bourdieu, le Art Moyen, and the Broad-Brow; C.Pollentier
PART II: TASTE-MAKERS AND PRINT CULTURES
I: UK
Cultural Hierarchies and the Inter-War British Press; A.Bingham
Priestley and the Highbrows; J.Baxendale
Aesthetics for Everyman: Arnold Bennett's Evening Standard Columns; J.Shapcott
'A Strongly Felt Need': Wilfred Whitten/John O'London and the Rise of the New Reading Public; J.Wild
II: US
The Excluded Middle: Cultural Polemics and Magazines in America, 1915-1933; V.Kingham
'Intellectual in its looser sense': Reading Mencken's Smart Set; S.Hamilton
Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority, and Autonomous Readers in Postwar America: James Gould Cozzens, Dwight Macdonald, and By Love Possessed;J.S.Rubin
PART III: CATEGORISATION AND VALUATION
The Returning Reader: Serial Middlebrow and Mazo de la Roche's Jalna Novels; C.Rifkind
Illustrating Mary Poppins: Visual Culture and the Middlebrow; K.Bluemel
Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project; N.Hubble
The Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow; N.Humble
Afterword; F.Hammill
Index