Middlebrow matters : women's reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque /
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,...
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| Online Access: |
Access full-text online via JSTOR |
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| Author / Contributor: | |
| Imprint: |
Liverpool :
Liverpool University Press,
2018.
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| Format: | Electronic |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Series: | Contemporary French and francophone cultures.
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| 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 Epoque, inter-war, early twenty-first century), authors (including Colette, Irene Nemirovsky, Francoise Sagan, Anna Gavalda) and the middlebrow nature of literary prizes. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (viii, 244 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-237) and index. |
| ISBN: | 1786941562 1786949520 9781786941565 9781786949523 |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Print version record. |