Middlebrow Literary Cultures

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

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2. Introduction: Middlebrow Matters

   1. Introduction: Middlebrow Matters

      • Erica Brown, Mary Grover

      Pages 1-21

3. Cultural Contexts

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

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   2. Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy

      • Janet Galligani Casey

      Pages 25-36

   3. Configuring Middleness: Bourdieu, l’Art Moyen and the Broadbrow

      • Caroline Pollentier

      Pages 37-51

4. Taste-Makers and Print Cultures

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 53-53

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   2. UK

      1. Cultural Hierarchies and the Interwar British Press

         • Adrian Bingham

         Pages 55-68

      2. Priestley and the Highbrows

         • John Baxendale

         Pages 69-81

      3. Aesthetics for Everyman: Arnold Bennett’s <i>Evening Standard</i> Columns

         • John Shapcott

         Pages 82-97

      4. ‘A Strongly Felt Need’: Wilfred Whitten/John O’London and the Rise of the New Reading Public

         • Jonathan Wild

         Pages 98-111

   3. US

      1. The Excluded Middle: Cultural Polemics and Magazines in America, 1915–1933

         • Victoria Kingham

         Pages 115-129

      2. ‘Intellectual in Its Looser Sense’: Reading Mencken’s <i>Smart Set</i>

         • Sharon Hamilton

         Pages 130-147

      3. Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority and Autonomous Readers in Post-war America: James Gould Cozzens, Dwight Macdonald and <i>By Love Possessed</i>

         • Joan Shelley Rubin

         Pages 148-167

5. Categorization and Valuation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 169-169

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   2. The Returning Reader: Canadian Serial Fiction and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna Novels

      • Candida Rifkind

      Pages 171-186

   3. Illustrating Mary Poppins: Visual Culture and the Middlebrow

      • Kristin Bluemel

      Pages 187-201

   4. Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project

      • Nick Hubble

      Pages 202-217

   5. The Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow

      • Nicola Humble

      Pages 218-230

6. Afterword

   1. Afterword

      • Faye Hammill

      Pages 231-233

7. Back Matter

   Pages 234-244

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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.

• aesthetics
• America
• Autorschaft
• culture
• novel
• realism
• Visual Culture

"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

• Sheffield Hallam University, UK

  Erica Brown, Mary Grover

JOHN BAXENDALE Visiting Fellow in the Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, UK ADRIAN BINGHAM Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Sheffield, UK KRISTIN BLUEMEL Professor of English, Monmouth University, UK JANET GALLIGANI CASEY Professor of English, Skidmore College, New York, USA SHARON HAMILTON Academic Dean, The International University, Vienna, Austria NICOLA HUMBLE Professor of English, Roehampton University, UK NICK HUBBLE Senior Lecturer in English, Brunel University, UK VICTORIA KINGHAM Independent Scholar, UK CAROLINE POLLENTIER Doctoral Student, Paris Diderot University, France CANDIDA RIFKIND Assistant Professor, University of Winnipeg, Canada JOHN SHAPCOTT Honorary Research Fellow, Research Institute for Humanities, Keele University, UK JOAN SHELLEY RUBIN Professor of History, University of Rochester, USA JONATHAN WILD Lecturer in English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK

Policies and ethics