Middlebrow Matters : Women's Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle Epoque PDF
by Diana Holmes
Part of the Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP series
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 Epoque, inter-war, early twenty-first century), authors (including Colette, Irene Nemirovsky, Francoise 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.
Information
-
Download - Immediately Available
- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Liverpool University Press
- Publication Date:01/12/2018
- Category:
- ISBN:9781786949523
Information
-
Download - Immediately Available
- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Liverpool University Press
- Publication Date:01/12/2018
- Category:
- ISBN:9781786949523
