Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960

Front Matter....Pages i-xii
Introduction: Middlebrow Matters....Pages 1-21
Front Matter....Pages 23-23
Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy....Pages 25-36
Configuring Middleness: Bourdieu, l’Art Moyen and the Broadbrow....Pages 37-51
Front Matter....Pages 53-53
Cultural Hierarchies and the Interwar British Press....Pages 55-68
Priestley and the Highbrows....Pages 69-81
Aesthetics for Everyman: Arnold Bennett’s Evening Standard Columns....Pages 82-97
‘A Strongly Felt Need’: Wilfred Whitten/John O’London and the Rise of the New Reading Public....Pages 98-111
The Excluded Middle: Cultural Polemics and Magazines in America, 1915–1933....Pages 115-129
‘Intellectual in Its Looser Sense’: Reading Mencken’s Smart Set....Pages 130-147
Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority and Autonomous Readers in Post-war America: James Gould Cozzens, Dwight Macdonald and By Love Possessed....Pages 148-167
Front Matter....Pages 169-169
The Returning Reader: Canadian Serial Fiction and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna Novels....Pages 171-186
Illustrating Mary Poppins: Visual Culture and the Middlebrow....Pages 187-201
Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project....Pages 202-217
The Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow....Pages 218-230
Afterword....Pages 231-233
Back Matter....Pages 234-244