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    Middlebrow Matters

    Women's reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque

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    Author(s)
    Holmes, Diana
    Collection
    Knowledge Unlatched (KU)
    Number
    102590
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    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.
    URI
    http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/26001
    Keywords
    Languages; Literary studies; fiction; novelists & prose writers; France; English; French
    DOI
    10.2307/j.ctvt1sk8w
    ISBN
    9781786949523
    OCN
    1100490961
    Publisher
    Liverpool University Press
    Publisher website
    https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/
    Publication date and place
    Liverpool, 2018-10-31
    Grantor
    • Knowledge Unlatched - 102590 - KU Select 2018: HSS Frontlist Books
    Series
    Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures,
    Classification
    Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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