Middlebrow Literary Cultures

JOHN BAXENDALE Visiting Fellow in the Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, UKADRIAN BINGHAM Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Sheffield, UKKRISTIN BLUEMEL Professor of English, Monmouth University, UK JANET GALLIGANI CASEY Professor of English, Skidmore College, New York, USA SHARON HAMILTON Academic Dean, The International University, Vienna, AustriaNICOLA HUMBLE Professor of English, Roehampton University, UKNICK HUBBLE Senior Lecturer in English, Brunel University, UK VICTORIA KINGHAM Independent Scholar, UKCAROLINE POLLENTIER Doctoral Student, Paris Diderot University, FranceCANDIDA RIFKIND Assistant Professor, University of Winnipeg, CanadaJOHN SHAPCOTT Honorary Research Fellow, Research Institute for Humanities, Keele University, UKJOAN SHELLEY RUBIN Professor of History, University of Rochester, USAJONATHAN WILD Lecturer in English Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Middlebrow Matters; E.Brown  & M.Grover PART I: CULTURAL CONTEXTS Middlebrow Reading and Undergraduate Teaching: The Place of the Middlebrow in the Academy; J.G.Casey Configuring Middleness: Bourdieu, le Art Moyen, and the Broad-Brow; C.Pollentier PART II: TASTE-MAKERS AND PRINT CULTURES I: UK Cultural Hierarchies and the Inter-War British Press; A.Bingham Priestley and the Highbrows; J.Baxendale Aesthetics for Everyman: Arnold Bennett's Evening Standard Columns; J.Shapcott 'A Strongly Felt Need': Wilfred Whitten/John O'London and the Rise of the New Reading Public; J.Wild II: US The Excluded Middle: Cultural Polemics and Magazines in America, 1915-1933; V.Kingham 'Intellectual in its looser sense': Reading Mencken's Smart Set; S.Hamilton Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority, and Autonomous Readers in Postwar America: James Gould Cozzens, Dwight Macdonald, and By Love Possessed; J.S.Rubin PART III: CATEGORISATION AND VALUATION The Returning Reader: Serial Middlebrow and Mazo de la Roche's Jalna Novels; C.Rifkind Illustrating Mary Poppins: Visual Culture and the Middlebrow; K.Bluemel Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project; N.Hubble The Queer Pleasures of Reading: Camp and the Middlebrow; N.Humble Afterword; F.Hammill Index

"It is fitting . . . that Faye Hammill should bring Middlebrow Literary Cultures to a close in an Afterword where she quotes fromRaymond Williams's Culture and Society, 1780 1950 (1958): 'There are in fact no middlebrows; there are only ways of seeing people and books as middlebrow' (p. 300). Middlebrow Literary Cultures is a stimulating and scholarly addition to this long-running debate, and an indispensable extension to our continuing enquiries into the complications and vagaries of critical reception." - Cambridge Quarterly 2013