Download or read book Middlebrow Literary Cultures written by E. Brown and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Making of Middlebrow Culture written by Joan Shelley Rubin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The New Literary Middlebrow written by B. Driscoll and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Caribbean Middlebrow written by Belinda Edmondson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Middlebrow Matters written by Diana Holmes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German Jewish Identity written by Jonathan M. Hess and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book America the Middlebrow written by Jaime Harker and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the connections between literature and progressive politics in the publication of women's fiction.
Download or read book Masscult and Midcult written by Dwight Macdonald and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s written by Nicola Humble and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humble presents a study of the novels by and for middle-class women that dominated the publishing market in the first half of the 20th century. She studies the work of authors such as Agatha Christie alongside cultural products such as cookery books.
Download or read book Cold War Orientalism written by Christina Klein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-03-10 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years following World War II, American writers and artists produced a steady stream of popular stories about Americans living, working, and traveling in Asia and the Pacific. Meanwhile the U.S., competing with the Soviet Union for global power, extended its reach into Asia to an unprecedented degree. This book reveals that these trends—the proliferation of Orientalist culture and the expansion of U.S. power—were linked in complex and surprising ways. While most cultural historians of the Cold War have focused on the culture of containment, Christina Klein reads the postwar period as one of international economic and political integration—a distinct chapter in the process of U.S.-led globalization. Through her analysis of a wide range of texts and cultural phenomena—including Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and The King and I, James Michener's travel essays and novel Hawaii, and Eisenhower's People-to-People Program—Klein shows how U.S. policy makers, together with middlebrow artists, writers, and intellectuals, created a culture of global integration that represented the growth of U.S. power in Asia as the forging of emotionally satisfying bonds between Americans and Asians. Her book enlarges Edward Said's notion of Orientalism in order to bring to light a cultural narrative about both domestic and international integration that still resonates today.
Download or read book Modernism Middlebrow and the Literary Canon written by Lise Jaillant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s and 1930s the Modern Library series began to bring out cheap editions of modernist works. Jaillant provides a thorough analysis of the series’ mix of highbrow and popular literature and argues that the availability and low cost of modernist works helped to expand modernism's influence as a literary movement.
Download or read book Married Middlebrow and Militant written by Teresa Mangum and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the life and work of this daring nineteenth-century author and women's rights advocate
Download or read book Imperial Middlebrow written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection Imperial Middlebrow, edited by Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch, surveys colonial middlebrow texts concentrating on Britain, India, South Africa, the West Indies, and so on, and uses the concept as a tool to read contemporary writing from Britain and Nigeria.
Download or read book A Feeling for Books written by Janice A. Radway and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.
Download or read book Lolita in Peyton Place written by Ruth Pirsig Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the differences in content, reader expectation, and social/moral/ethical functions of the three types of novels in America of the 1950s. It challenges the notion that highbrow novels (Lolita ) do important cultural work while popular novels contribute to personal and social decay, and examines how time periods influence the moral content of novels. The book separates popular fiction into lowbrow (Peyton Place ) and middlebrow (Man in the Grey Flannel Suit ) and explains that lowbrow (like highbrow) evolves from the folklore tradition and contains messages about how to be a good man or good woman and how to find a satisfying niche in the social order. Middlebrow, on the other hand, evolves from myth tradition and relates lessons on what personal adjustments need to be made to succeed in the economic order. Middlebrow novels most reflect the time and place of their writing because conditions for economic survival change more than conditions for social survival. Arguing that what most distinguishes highbrow from lowbrow is the audience, highbrow writers try to separate from the flock; lowbrow writers to include. This study differs from such well-known studies of popular fiction as John Cawelti's and Janice Radway's in looking beyond the surface features of plot, character, and theme. The book also challenges arguments that novels in which marriage is women's highest triumph and aggressive heroism men's reinforce limiting cultural paradigms.
Download or read book Intermodernism written by Kristin Bluemel and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These 10 original critical essays examine the fascinating writing of the Depression and World War II. Divided into four sections--Work, Community,War, and Documents--the volume focuses on texts that are typically ignored in accounts of modernism or The Auden Generation.Chapters examine writing by Elizabeth Bowen, Storm Jameson, William Empson, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Harold Heslop, T. H. White, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, John Grierson, Margery Allingham and Stella Gibbons. These authors were politically radical, or radically 'eccentric', and tended to be committed to working- and middle-class cultures, non-canonical genres, such as crime and fantasy, and minority forms of narrative, such as journalism, manifestos, film, and travel narratives, as well as novels. The volume supports further research with an appendix, 'Who Were the Intermodernists?', a listing of archival sources and an extensive bibliography.
Download or read book Middlebrow Wodehouse written by Ann Rea and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While he is best known for his Jeeves and Bertie Wooster stories, P.G. Wodehouse was a prolific writer who penned many other novels, stories, and musical comedy libretti, the latter of which played an enormous role in the development of American musical theater. This collection re-examines Wodehouse in the context of recent scholarship on the middlebrow, attending to his self-conscious relationship to the literary marketplace and his role in moving musical comedy away from vaudeville’s lowbrow associations towards the sophistication of the Wodehouse style. The focus on the middlebrow creates a critical context for serious critical consideration of Wodehouse’s linguistic playfulness and his depictions of social class within England. The contributors explore Wodehouse’s fiction and libretti in reference to philosophy, depictions of masculinity, World War I Britain, the periodical market, ideas of Englishness, and cultural phenomena such as men’s fashion, food culture, and popular songwriting. Taken together, the essays draw attention to the arbitrary divide between high- and middlebrow culture and make a case for Wodehouse as a writer whose games with language are in keeping with modernist experimentation with artistic expression.
