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

• Main Author: Holmes, Diana (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Liverpool Liverpool University Press 2018
• Series: Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
• Subjects: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers; Languages; Literary studies; fiction; novelists & prose writers; France; English; French
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

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.