Middlebrow matters : women's reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque / Diana Holmes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Holmes, Diana, 1949- author.

Series:

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures

Contemporary French and francophone cultures ; 57

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

French fiction.

French fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

Women--Books and reading--France--History--20th century.

Women.

Women--Books and reading--France--History--21st century.

Women and literature--France--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

Women and literature--France--History--21st century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (244 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2018.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

<b>An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.<br>Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, 2018.</b><br>This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. Middlebrow is a derogatory word that connotes blandness, mediocrity and a failed aspiration to 'high' culture. However, when appropriated as a positive term to denote that wide swathe of literature between the challenging experimentalism of the high and the formulaic tendency of the popular, it enables a rethinking of the literary canon from the point of view of what most readers actually read, a criterion curiously absent from dominant definitions of literary value. Since women have long formed a majority of the reading public, this perspective immediately feminises what has always been a very male canon. Opening with a theorisation of the concept of middlebrow that mounts a defence of some literary qualities disdained by modernism, the book then focuses on a series of case studies of periods (the Belle Époque, inter-war, early twenty-first century), authors (including Colette, Irène Nemirovsky, Françoise Sagan, Anna Gavalda) and the middlebrow nature of literary prizes. It concludes with a double reading of a single text, from the perspective of an academic critic, and from that of a middlebrow reader.

Contents:

Reclaiming the middlebrow

The birth of French middlebrow

Colette: The middlebrow modernist

Interwar France: The case of the missing middlebrow

The 'little world' of Françoise Sagan

Literary prizes, women and the middlebrow

Realism, romance and self-reflexivity: Twenty-first-century middlebrow

Conclusion: Marie NDiaye's femme puissante

a double reading.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Jul 2020).

CC BY-NC-ND

ISBN:

9781786949523

1786949520

OCLC:

1084270115

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access