Includes bibliographical references (pages 242-261) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Transitions and cultural formations / Kate Macdonald and Christoph Singer -- What people really read in 1922 : If Winter Comes, the bestseller in the annus mirabilis of modernism / Kirsten MacLeod -- Public gains and literary goods : a coeval tale of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Francis Marion Crawford / Simon Frost -- 'To-day has never been 'highbrow'' : middlebrow, modernism, and the many faces of To-day / Louise Kane -- Domesticating modern art : Charles Marriott (1869-1957) and the art of middlebrow criticism / Rebecca Sitch -- 'Sentiment wasn't dead' : anti-modernism in John Galsworthy's The White Monkey / Alison Hurlburt -- HG Wells'The Sea Lady and the siren call of the middlebrow / Emma Miller -- Scottish modernism, Kailyard fiction, and the woman at home / Samantha Walton -- 'The most thrilling and fascinating book of the century' : marketing Gustave Flaubert in late nineteenth-century England / Juliette Atkinson -- Cross-channel mediations: Henry-D Davray and British popular fiction in the Mercure de France / Birgit Van Puymbroeck -- Middlebrow criticism across national borders : Arnold Bennett and Herman Robbers on literary taste in Britain and the Netherlands / Koen Rymenants -- Who framed Edgar Wallace? British popular fiction and middlebrow criticism in the Netherlands' / Mathijs Sanders and Alex Rutten -- Bibliography -- Index.
Summary:
"Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930 examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays describe the connections, interstices and transitions from the highbrow and lowbrow into the middlebrow, and illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines. This period saw major changes in the literary and artistic tastes of the cultural elites, the publishing houses, the magazines and the reading public, and so the authors explore the influence of modernism outside elitist territories, examining middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments in the marketplace. The essays discuss the authors J M Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, F M Crawford, Gustave Flaubert, John Galsworthy, A S M Hutchinson, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Wallace, and H G Wells; the critics Henry-D. Davray, Herman Robbers and Charles Marriott; and the magazines To-Day and the Mercure de France"-- Provided by publisher.
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