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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Holmes, Diana, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--History and criticism.

Literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (257 pages)

Other Title:

Knowledge Unlatched.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2018.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

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 drive 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 nation's 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, Irà ̈ne Nemirovsky, Françoise Sagan, Anna Gavalda) and the middlebrow nature of literary prizes.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Local Notes:

KU Select 2018: HSS Frontlist Books

BiblioBoard internal publisher id: 102590

ISBN:

9781786949523

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access