Middlebrow Literary Cultures

Middlebrow Literary Cultures PDF Author: E. Brown
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230354645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
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.

Middlebrow Literary Cultures

Middlebrow Literary Cultures PDF Author: E. Brown
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230354645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Making of Middlebrow Culture

The Making of Middlebrow Culture PDF Author: Joan Shelley Rubin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807864269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman. Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.

Caribbean Middlebrow

Caribbean Middlebrow PDF Author: Belinda Edmondson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801448140
Category : Black people
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.

The New Literary Middlebrow

The New Literary Middlebrow PDF Author: B. Driscoll
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137402912
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The middlebrow is a dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. This book defines the new literary middlebrow through eight key features: middle class, feminized, reverential, commercial, emotional, recreational, earnest and mediated. Case studies include Oprah's Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Middlebrow Matters

Middlebrow Matters PDF Author: Diana Holmes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1786941562
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. It asks what middlebrow means, and applies the term positively to explore the 'poetics' of the types of novel that have attracted 'ordinary' fiction readers - in their majority female - since the end of the 19th century.

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity PDF Author: Jonathan M. Hess
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774234
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

America the Middlebrow

America the Middlebrow PDF Author: Jaime Harker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Explores the connections between literature and progressive politics in the publication of women's fiction.

Masscult and Midcult

Masscult and Midcult PDF Author: Dwight Macdonald
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s

The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s PDF Author: Nicola Humble
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198186762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The work of over thirty novelists is covered, read alongside other discourses as diverse as cookery books, child-care manuals, and the reports of Mass Observation. Investigating the nature of the feminine middlebrow and its readers, the author considers its variously radical and conservative remakings of ideas of class, the home, the family and gender."--BOOK JACKET.

Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930

Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930 PDF Author: K. Macdonald
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137486775
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines.