While he is best known for his Jeeves and Bertie Wooster stories, P.G. Wodehouse was a prolific writer who penned many other novels, stories, and musical comedy libretti, the latter of which played an enormous role in the development of American musical theater. This collection re-examines Wodehouse in the context of recent scholarship on the middlebrow, attending to his self-conscious relationship to the literary marketplace and his role in moving musical comedy away from vaudeville’s lowbrow associations towards the sophistication of the Wodehouse style. The focus on the middlebrow creates a critical context for serious critical consideration of Wodehouse’s linguistic playfulness and his depictions of social class within England. The contributors explore Wodehouse’s fiction and libretti in reference to philosophy, depictions of masculinity, World War I Britain, the periodical market, ideas of Englishness, and cultural phenomena such as men’s fashion, food culture, and popular songwriting. Taken together, the essays draw attention to the arbitrary divide between high- and middlebrow culture and make a case for Wodehouse as a writer whose games with language are in keeping with modernist experimentation with artistic expression.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction to Middlebrow Wodehouse; Know your audience: middlebrow aesthetic and literary positioning in the fiction of P.G. Wodehouse, Ann-Marie Einhaus; Reading up or curling up with a book: aspiring and promiscuous readers in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Bertie stories, Ann Rea; Before Jeeves: impudence in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels, 1909-23, Michael T. Williamson; P.G. Wodehouse and the First World War, George Simmers; The prison camp as public school: Wodehouse, school stories and the Second World War, Caleb Richardson; The place of the pig: Blandings, Barsetshire, and Britain, Debra Rae Cohen; P.G. Wodehouse and the American musical comedy: innovations in writing, Basil Considine; Wooster the musician, Kenneth Kreitner; Philosophy with a smile, Richard Hall; ’A fairly unclouded life’: upper-class masculinity in crisis in the early Jeeves and Wooster, Roz Tuplin; The queer domesticity of Bertie and Jeeves, Brian D. Holcomb; Problematic menswear in P.G. Wodehouse and Dornford Yates, Kate Macdonald; In the soup: food and hospitality in wartime Wodehouse, Ariel Buckley; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.
About the Author :
Ann Rea is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, USA.
