| Middlebrow Matters: Women's Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque Contributor(s): Holmes, Diana (Author) |
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ISBN: 1786941562 ISBN-13: 9781786941565 Publisher: Liverpool University Press OUR PRICE: $65.34 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: January 2019 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | European - French - Literary Criticism | Women Authors - Literary Criticism | Modern - 19th Century |
| Dewey: 843.912 |
| LCCN: 2020445971 |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6.3" W x 9.3" (1.15 lbs) 256 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - French - Sex & Gender - Feminine - Chronological Period - 19th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 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, 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. |
