Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930

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 on 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.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Transitions and cultural formations; Kate Macdonald, Ghent University, and Christoph Singer 2. What people really read in 1922: If Winter Comes, the bestseller in the annus mirabilis of modernism; Kirsten MacLeod 3. Public gains and literary goods: a coeval tale of Conrad, Kipling and Francis Marion Crawford; Simon Frost 4. 'To-day has never been 'highbrow": middlebrow, modernism, and the many faces of To-day; Louise Kane 5. Domesticating modern art: Charles Marriott (1869-1957) and the art of middlebrow criticism; Rebecca Sitch 6. 'Sentiment wasn't dead': anti-modernism in John Galsworthy's The White Monkey; Alison Hurlburt 7. HG Wells'The Sea Lady and the siren call of the middlebrow; Emma Miller 8. Scottish modernism, Kailyard, and the woman at home; Samantha Walton 9. 'The most thrilling and fascinating book of the century': marketing Gustave Flaubert in late nineteenth-century Britain; Juliette Atkinson 10. Cross-channel mediations: Henry-D. Davray and British popular fiction in the Mercure de France; Birgit Van Puymbroeck 11. Middlebrow criticism across national borders: Arnold Bennett and Herman Robbers on literary taste in Britain and the Netherlands; Koen Rymenants 12. Who framed Edgar Wallace? British popular fiction and middlebrow criticism in the Netherlands'; Mathijs Sanders and Alex Rutten Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Kate Macdonald is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She has published widely on middlebrow and British literary history, and her publications include Novelists Against Social Change (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2015), John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (co-edited with Nathan Waddell, 2013), The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950 (editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Reassessing John Buchan (editor, 2009), and John Buchan. A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (2009). Christoph Singer is a research assistant in the Department of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. In 2012 he finished his dissertation on literary representations of shorelines as liminal spaces. Other research interests include the (history of) copyright, spatial practices, and Early Modern culture and Literature.