Janet Galligani Casey
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195338959
- eISBN:
- 9780199867103
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338959.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which women’s rural fiction was heavily implicated in conversations about the encroachment of middlebrow culture, and discusses the remarkable popularity of ...
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This chapter demonstrates the ways in which women’s rural fiction was heavily implicated in conversations about the encroachment of middlebrow culture, and discusses the remarkable popularity of best-selling rural fiction by women. It analyzes the economy of literary prizes and the prominent placement of these novels within that economy, and attempts to unpack the presumed relations among women, sentimentality, and rurality. It also reads closely several best-sellers—by Edna Ferber, Martha Ostenso, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Gladys Hasty Carroll—both for what they demonstrate about the relations among women, rurality, and the bookselling industry, and to refute the assertion that women’s farm novels of the period were trite, or that they evaded engagement with the pressing concerns of modernity.Less
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which women’s rural fiction was heavily implicated in conversations about the encroachment of middlebrow culture, and discusses the remarkable popularity of best-selling rural fiction by women. It analyzes the economy of literary prizes and the prominent placement of these novels within that economy, and attempts to unpack the presumed relations among women, sentimentality, and rurality. It also reads closely several best-sellers—by Edna Ferber, Martha Ostenso, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Gladys Hasty Carroll—both for what they demonstrate about the relations among women, rurality, and the bookselling industry, and to refute the assertion that women’s farm novels of the period were trite, or that they evaded engagement with the pressing concerns of modernity.
Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381403
- eISBN:
- 9781781382332
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381403.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
A century ago, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the beginning of a golden age of travel. Images of speed and flight dominated the pages of the new mass-market periodicals. This ...
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A century ago, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the beginning of a golden age of travel. Images of speed and flight dominated the pages of the new mass-market periodicals. This book centres on Canada, where commercial magazines began to flourish in the 1920s alongside an expanding network of luxury railway hotels and transatlantic liner routes. The leading monthlies — among them Mayfair, Chatelaine, and La Revue Moderne — presented travel as both a mode of self-improvement and a way of negotiating national identity. This book announces a new cross-cultural approach to periodical studies, reading both French-and English-language magazines in relation to an emerging transatlantic middlebrow culture. Mainstream magazines, the text argues, forged a connection between upward mobility and geographical mobility. Fantasies of travel were circulated through fiction, articles, and advertisements, and used to sell fashions, foods, and domestic products as well as holidays.Less
A century ago, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the beginning of a golden age of travel. Images of speed and flight dominated the pages of the new mass-market periodicals. This book centres on Canada, where commercial magazines began to flourish in the 1920s alongside an expanding network of luxury railway hotels and transatlantic liner routes. The leading monthlies — among them Mayfair, Chatelaine, and La Revue Moderne — presented travel as both a mode of self-improvement and a way of negotiating national identity. This book announces a new cross-cultural approach to periodical studies, reading both French-and English-language magazines in relation to an emerging transatlantic middlebrow culture. Mainstream magazines, the text argues, forged a connection between upward mobility and geographical mobility. Fantasies of travel were circulated through fiction, articles, and advertisements, and used to sell fashions, foods, and domestic products as well as holidays.
Celia Marshik
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231175043
- eISBN:
- 9780231542968
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231175043.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In much of modern fiction, it is the clothes that make the character. Garments embody personal and national histories. They convey wealth, status, aspiration, and morality (or a lack thereof). They ...
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In much of modern fiction, it is the clothes that make the character. Garments embody personal and national histories. They convey wealth, status, aspiration, and morality (or a lack thereof). They suggest where characters have been and where they might be headed, as well as whether or not they are aware of their fate. This study explores the agency of fashion in modern literature.
Celia Marshik’s study combines close readings of modernist and middlebrow works, a history of Britain in the early twentieth century, and the insights of thing theory. She focuses on four distinct categories of modern clothing: the evening gown, the mackintosh, the fancy dress costume, and secondhand attire. In their use of these clothes, we see authors negotiate shifting gender roles, weigh the value of individuality during national conflict, work through mortality, and depict changing class structures. Marshik’s dynamic comparisons put Ulysses in conversation with Rebecca, Punch cartoons, articles in Vogue, and letters from consumers, illuminating opinions about specific garments and a widespread anxiety that people were no more than what they wore. Throughout her readings, Marshik emphasizes the persistent animation of clothing—and objectification of individuals—in early-twentieth-century literature and society. She argues that while artists and intellectuals celebrated the ability of modern individuals to remake themselves, a range of literary works and popular publications points to a lingering anxiety about how political, social, and economic conditions continued to constrain the individual.Less
In much of modern fiction, it is the clothes that make the character. Garments embody personal and national histories. They convey wealth, status, aspiration, and morality (or a lack thereof). They suggest where characters have been and where they might be headed, as well as whether or not they are aware of their fate. This study explores the agency of fashion in modern literature.
Celia Marshik’s study combines close readings of modernist and middlebrow works, a history of Britain in the early twentieth century, and the insights of thing theory. She focuses on four distinct categories of modern clothing: the evening gown, the mackintosh, the fancy dress costume, and secondhand attire. In their use of these clothes, we see authors negotiate shifting gender roles, weigh the value of individuality during national conflict, work through mortality, and depict changing class structures. Marshik’s dynamic comparisons put Ulysses in conversation with Rebecca, Punch cartoons, articles in Vogue, and letters from consumers, illuminating opinions about specific garments and a widespread anxiety that people were no more than what they wore. Throughout her readings, Marshik emphasizes the persistent animation of clothing—and objectification of individuals—in early-twentieth-century literature and society. She argues that while artists and intellectuals celebrated the ability of modern individuals to remake themselves, a range of literary works and popular publications points to a lingering anxiety about how political, social, and economic conditions continued to constrain the individual.
Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells, and Minna Vuohelainen (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526124340
- eISBN:
- 9781526136206
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526124340.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh, an important but neglected professional author. Richard ...
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This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh, an important but neglected professional author. Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915) began his literary career as a writer of boys’ fiction, but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. Marsh was a prolific and popular author of middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this collection of essays examines a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through the lens of cutting-edge critical theory, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis, object relations theory and art history, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period. Marsh emerges here as a versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time whose stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres of fiction with which we are familiar today. Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often offering unexpected, subversive and even counter-hegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle.Less
This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh, an important but neglected professional author. Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915) began his literary career as a writer of boys’ fiction, but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. Marsh was a prolific and popular author of middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this collection of essays examines a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through the lens of cutting-edge critical theory, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis, object relations theory and art history, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period. Marsh emerges here as a versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time whose stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres of fiction with which we are familiar today. Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often offering unexpected, subversive and even counter-hegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle.
Vike Martina Plock
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474427418
- eISBN:
- 9781474434607
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427418.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the Flapper. Modernism, Fashion ...
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An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the Flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity’s economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference. For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity. By examining their published work and unpublished correspondence, this book investigates how the chosen authors used fashion terminology to discuss the possibilities available to women to express difference and individuality in a world that actually favoured standardised products and collective formations.Less
An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the Flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity’s economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference. For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity. By examining their published work and unpublished correspondence, this book investigates how the chosen authors used fashion terminology to discuss the possibilities available to women to express difference and individuality in a world that actually favoured standardised products and collective formations.
Clarisse Berthezène
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719086496
- eISBN:
- 9781781708941
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719086496.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Conflict Politics and Policy
This book examines attempts by the British Conservative party in the interwar years to capture and train the minds of the new electorate and create a counter-culture to what they saw as the ...
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This book examines attempts by the British Conservative party in the interwar years to capture and train the minds of the new electorate and create a counter-culture to what they saw as the intellectual hegemony of the Left. It is an important contribution to the political culture of Conservatism from the late 1920s to the early 1950s with a particular emphasis on the social and intellectual history of the Conservative milieu. This volume tells the fascinating story of the Bonar Law Memorial College, Ashridge, founded in 1929 as a ‘College of citizenship’ to provide political education through both teaching and publications. The College aimed at creating ‘Conservative Fabians’ who were to publish and disseminate Conservative literature, which meant not only explicitly political works but literary, historical and cultural work that carried implicit Conservative messages. After 1945, as the Conservative party sought to jettison its Baldwinian Past, Ashridge lost its political anchor, and moved, through complex stages, to being refounded as a management training college in 1954. This book modifies our understanding of the history of intellectual debate in Britain and it sheds new light on the history of the ‘middlebrow’ and how that category became a weapon for the Conservatives. It will become necessary reading both for scholars and students of modern British history and politics and more generally for those interested in the history of Conservatism.Less
This book examines attempts by the British Conservative party in the interwar years to capture and train the minds of the new electorate and create a counter-culture to what they saw as the intellectual hegemony of the Left. It is an important contribution to the political culture of Conservatism from the late 1920s to the early 1950s with a particular emphasis on the social and intellectual history of the Conservative milieu. This volume tells the fascinating story of the Bonar Law Memorial College, Ashridge, founded in 1929 as a ‘College of citizenship’ to provide political education through both teaching and publications. The College aimed at creating ‘Conservative Fabians’ who were to publish and disseminate Conservative literature, which meant not only explicitly political works but literary, historical and cultural work that carried implicit Conservative messages. After 1945, as the Conservative party sought to jettison its Baldwinian Past, Ashridge lost its political anchor, and moved, through complex stages, to being refounded as a management training college in 1954. This book modifies our understanding of the history of intellectual debate in Britain and it sheds new light on the history of the ‘middlebrow’ and how that category became a weapon for the Conservatives. It will become necessary reading both for scholars and students of modern British history and politics and more generally for those interested in the history of Conservatism.
Ross McKibbin
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198206729
- eISBN:
- 9780191677298
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206729.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Social History
The great majority of the English were attached to two forms of music — middlebrow and popular. This chapter traces the historical development of a middlebrow ‘canon’ of music, popular music, and ...
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The great majority of the English were attached to two forms of music — middlebrow and popular. This chapter traces the historical development of a middlebrow ‘canon’ of music, popular music, and dancing after the First World War. The middlebrow canon, aside from its native origins, was drawn largely from European influences, but outside influences on popular music were almost entirely American. The chapter assesses how far English popular music succumbed to or withstood America and looks more generally at the part dancing played in people's lives. Throughout this period there were three musical publics. There was a very small public for ‘serious’ music, a considerably larger one for ‘middlebrow’ music, and a much larger one for ‘popular’ music.Less
The great majority of the English were attached to two forms of music — middlebrow and popular. This chapter traces the historical development of a middlebrow ‘canon’ of music, popular music, and dancing after the First World War. The middlebrow canon, aside from its native origins, was drawn largely from European influences, but outside influences on popular music were almost entirely American. The chapter assesses how far English popular music succumbed to or withstood America and looks more generally at the part dancing played in people's lives. Throughout this period there were three musical publics. There was a very small public for ‘serious’ music, a considerably larger one for ‘middlebrow’ music, and a much larger one for ‘popular’ music.
Matthew S. Hedstrom
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780195374490
- eISBN:
- 9780199979141
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195374490.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The Religious Book Club, founded in 1927, was a major institution of religious middlebrow culture through the middle decades of the twentieth century. It exemplified the importance of book clubs to ...
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The Religious Book Club, founded in 1927, was a major institution of religious middlebrow culture through the middle decades of the twentieth century. It exemplified the importance of book clubs to the wider middlebrow culture, and illustrates the reading and consuming practices that shaped encounters with religious books in this period. In addition to book clubs, a variety of reading programs based on book lists, such as the Hazen Books in Religion series, and the lists produced by the Religious Books Round Table of the American Library Association, brought religious middlebrow reading practices to the American middle class. Religious middlebrow culture most specifically introduced readers to forms of liberal religion rooted in psychology and mysticism, and thereby shaped middle class spirituality for decades to come.Less
The Religious Book Club, founded in 1927, was a major institution of religious middlebrow culture through the middle decades of the twentieth century. It exemplified the importance of book clubs to the wider middlebrow culture, and illustrates the reading and consuming practices that shaped encounters with religious books in this period. In addition to book clubs, a variety of reading programs based on book lists, such as the Hazen Books in Religion series, and the lists produced by the Religious Books Round Table of the American Library Association, brought religious middlebrow reading practices to the American middle class. Religious middlebrow culture most specifically introduced readers to forms of liberal religion rooted in psychology and mysticism, and thereby shaped middle class spirituality for decades to come.
Jaime Harker
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816679133
- eISBN:
- 9781452948072
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816679133.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
How could one write about gay life for the mainstream public in Cold War America? Many midcentury gay American writers, hampered by external and internal censors, never managed to do it. But ...
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How could one write about gay life for the mainstream public in Cold War America? Many midcentury gay American writers, hampered by external and internal censors, never managed to do it. But Christopher Isherwood did, and what makes his accomplishment more remarkable is that while he was negotiating his identity as a gay writer, he was reinventing himself as an American one. This book shows that Isherwood refashioned himself as an American writer following his emigration from England by immersing himself in the gay reading, writing, and publishing communities in Cold War America. Drawing extensively on Isherwood’s archives, including manuscript drafts and unpublished correspondence with readers, publishers, and other writers, this book demonstrates how Isherwood mainstreamed gay content for heterosexual readers in his postwar novels while also covertly writing for gay audiences and encouraging a symbiotic relationship between writer and reader. The result—in such novels as The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River—was a complex, layered form of writing that this book calls “middlebrow camp,” a mode that extended the boundaries of both gay and middlebrow fiction.Less
How could one write about gay life for the mainstream public in Cold War America? Many midcentury gay American writers, hampered by external and internal censors, never managed to do it. But Christopher Isherwood did, and what makes his accomplishment more remarkable is that while he was negotiating his identity as a gay writer, he was reinventing himself as an American one. This book shows that Isherwood refashioned himself as an American writer following his emigration from England by immersing himself in the gay reading, writing, and publishing communities in Cold War America. Drawing extensively on Isherwood’s archives, including manuscript drafts and unpublished correspondence with readers, publishers, and other writers, this book demonstrates how Isherwood mainstreamed gay content for heterosexual readers in his postwar novels while also covertly writing for gay audiences and encouraging a symbiotic relationship between writer and reader. The result—in such novels as The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River—was a complex, layered form of writing that this book calls “middlebrow camp,” a mode that extended the boundaries of both gay and middlebrow fiction.
Juliette Atkinson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780197266090
- eISBN:
- 9780191860003
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266090.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
There are sound reasons for concluding in 1870–1. The Franco-Prussian War affected attitudes towards France, some of France’s major novelists died, a new generation of novelists led by Zola was on ...
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There are sound reasons for concluding in 1870–1. The Franco-Prussian War affected attitudes towards France, some of France’s major novelists died, a new generation of novelists led by Zola was on the rise, and the 1870 Education Act created fresh concerns about the composition and tastes of the reading public. Although interest in French literature did not begin in the 1870s, as many critics have claimed, the decade did mark a more defiant attitude towards supposed Victorian prudery, and a willingness to highlight and champion the transgressive qualities of French literature. It was in this period that censorshiptook centre stage, but those who resisted it were also ambivalent about the wisdom of allowing readers to access French works indiscriminately. As in previous decades, the critical discourse was often quietly challenged by reading practices.Less
There are sound reasons for concluding in 1870–1. The Franco-Prussian War affected attitudes towards France, some of France’s major novelists died, a new generation of novelists led by Zola was on the rise, and the 1870 Education Act created fresh concerns about the composition and tastes of the reading public. Although interest in French literature did not begin in the 1870s, as many critics have claimed, the decade did mark a more defiant attitude towards supposed Victorian prudery, and a willingness to highlight and champion the transgressive qualities of French literature. It was in this period that censorshiptook centre stage, but those who resisted it were also ambivalent about the wisdom of allowing readers to access French works indiscriminately. As in previous decades, the critical discourse was often quietly challenged by reading practices.
Alexandra Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190912666
- eISBN:
- 9780190912697
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190912666.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera, History, Western
Opera in the Jazz Age examines the place of opera in the contemporary ‘battle of the brows’: a debate, prompted by the growth of the mass entertainment industry, about the extent to which art forms ...
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Opera in the Jazz Age examines the place of opera in the contemporary ‘battle of the brows’: a debate, prompted by the growth of the mass entertainment industry, about the extent to which art forms ought to be labelled ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, or ‘lowbrow’. The book considers this question from a number of viewpoints, examining topics including: the audience for opera during the period; opera’s interactions with forms of popular culture including jazz, film, and middlebrow novels; and the ways in which different types and nationalities of opera were categorised differently. A number of significant figures in the highbrow–lowbrow debate are scrutinised, among them highbrow and middlebrow critics, the mythical figure of the ‘man in the street’, and the much reviled celebrity singer. The book explains how modern technological dissemination methods such as gramophone recordings and broadcasting came to bear upon questions of cultural categorisation, as did contemporary anxieties about national identity. The book concludes that opera was very difficult to categorise according to the new terms: for some commentators it was too highbrow; for others not highbrow enough. Examining the battle of the brows through an operatic lens challenges received wisdom by revealing the fault lines in this supposedly definitive system of cultural categorisation, undermining any simplistic binary between the high and the low. More broadly, the book also gives a detailed account of British operatic culture of the 1920s from the perspectives of performance, staging, opera-going, and criticism.Less
Opera in the Jazz Age examines the place of opera in the contemporary ‘battle of the brows’: a debate, prompted by the growth of the mass entertainment industry, about the extent to which art forms ought to be labelled ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, or ‘lowbrow’. The book considers this question from a number of viewpoints, examining topics including: the audience for opera during the period; opera’s interactions with forms of popular culture including jazz, film, and middlebrow novels; and the ways in which different types and nationalities of opera were categorised differently. A number of significant figures in the highbrow–lowbrow debate are scrutinised, among them highbrow and middlebrow critics, the mythical figure of the ‘man in the street’, and the much reviled celebrity singer. The book explains how modern technological dissemination methods such as gramophone recordings and broadcasting came to bear upon questions of cultural categorisation, as did contemporary anxieties about national identity. The book concludes that opera was very difficult to categorise according to the new terms: for some commentators it was too highbrow; for others not highbrow enough. Examining the battle of the brows through an operatic lens challenges received wisdom by revealing the fault lines in this supposedly definitive system of cultural categorisation, undermining any simplistic binary between the high and the low. More broadly, the book also gives a detailed account of British operatic culture of the 1920s from the perspectives of performance, staging, opera-going, and criticism.
John Howland
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520271036
- eISBN:
- 9780520951358
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520271036.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement ...
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From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, releasing a variety of richly orchestrated, urbane, jazz-inflected recordings, including acclaimed releases by Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. While the postwar period saw the decline of the traditional big band as a commercial force in popular culture, these jazz-pop ventures reinvented swing for the hi-fi era. Through close study of select arrangements, contemporary cultural discourse, and marketing and promotion, this essay articulates the larger aesthetic issues and cultural conditions that shaped the hybrid, middlebrow ideals of these jazz-with-strings subgenres.Less
From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, releasing a variety of richly orchestrated, urbane, jazz-inflected recordings, including acclaimed releases by Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. While the postwar period saw the decline of the traditional big band as a commercial force in popular culture, these jazz-pop ventures reinvented swing for the hi-fi era. Through close study of select arrangements, contemporary cultural discourse, and marketing and promotion, this essay articulates the larger aesthetic issues and cultural conditions that shaped the hybrid, middlebrow ideals of these jazz-with-strings subgenres.
Matthew S. Hedstrom
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780195374490
- eISBN:
- 9780199979141
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195374490.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, this book contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise. Most scholarship in American religious history, after all, ...
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The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, this book contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise. Most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals instead a story of “cultural victory.” The defining features of religious liberalism—its cosmopolitanism; its engagement with the latest historical and scientific thought; its ethics; its focus on psychology, mysticism, and individual religious experience—arose among a spiritual vanguard in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, but by the middle decades of the twentieth century had become commonplace among the American middle class. This book tells how that happened. This book attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture—particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century—as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, this book provides an on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-World War II period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. The conclusion relates these trends to the religious transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, and on into the twenty-first century.Less
The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, this book contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise. Most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals instead a story of “cultural victory.” The defining features of religious liberalism—its cosmopolitanism; its engagement with the latest historical and scientific thought; its ethics; its focus on psychology, mysticism, and individual religious experience—arose among a spiritual vanguard in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, but by the middle decades of the twentieth century had become commonplace among the American middle class. This book tells how that happened. This book attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture—particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century—as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, this book provides an on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-World War II period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. The conclusion relates these trends to the religious transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, and on into the twenty-first century.
Yung-Hsing Wu
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496812308
- eISBN:
- 9781496812346
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496812308.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This essay argues that William Faulkner’s participation in the People-to-People program rendered his authorship through a middlebrow patriotism. Made up of 40-odd committees representing a diverse ...
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This essay argues that William Faulkner’s participation in the People-to-People program rendered his authorship through a middlebrow patriotism. Made up of 40-odd committees representing a diverse range of “fields of activity,” the program was distinctive for its less highbrow suggestion that “friendship between peoples” could serve national interests in a Cold War climate. Its rhetoric of “friendly” politics would, however, find in the Writers’ Committee both a compelling and troubling instrument. With Faulkner as its head, and other noted writers participating, the committee afforded the program the cachet attached to authorship. The People-to-People impulse toward contact, on the other hand, also rendered authorship through a sensibility that embraced identification for its political potential. For the writers of the committee, many of whom were skeptical of any state imperative, this emphasis prompted assertions that vocation, the work of literature and reading, would always supersede political deployment.Less
This essay argues that William Faulkner’s participation in the People-to-People program rendered his authorship through a middlebrow patriotism. Made up of 40-odd committees representing a diverse range of “fields of activity,” the program was distinctive for its less highbrow suggestion that “friendship between peoples” could serve national interests in a Cold War climate. Its rhetoric of “friendly” politics would, however, find in the Writers’ Committee both a compelling and troubling instrument. With Faulkner as its head, and other noted writers participating, the committee afforded the program the cachet attached to authorship. The People-to-People impulse toward contact, on the other hand, also rendered authorship through a sensibility that embraced identification for its political potential. For the writers of the committee, many of whom were skeptical of any state imperative, this emphasis prompted assertions that vocation, the work of literature and reading, would always supersede political deployment.
Jaime Harker
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496812308
- eISBN:
- 9781496812346
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496812308.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter considers the symbiotic relationship between William Faulkner’s writing and women’s domestic fiction, particularly in his novels The Wild Palms and The Mansion. During the interwar ...
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This chapter considers the symbiotic relationship between William Faulkner’s writing and women’s domestic fiction, particularly in his novels The Wild Palms and The Mansion. During the interwar period, women’s magazines published a wide range of fiction, both serialized novels and short stories, and the literary influence of women’s magazines continued in the postwar period, when Faulkner published two short pieces in Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle. This chapter argues that Faulkner was aware of this market, targeted it as a publication venue, and shaped his fiction based on the conventions of middlebrow domestic fiction. This argument broadens recent investigation of Faulkner’s catholic engagement with print culture to include a women’s reading and writing community consistently overlooked by literary critics.Less
This chapter considers the symbiotic relationship between William Faulkner’s writing and women’s domestic fiction, particularly in his novels The Wild Palms and The Mansion. During the interwar period, women’s magazines published a wide range of fiction, both serialized novels and short stories, and the literary influence of women’s magazines continued in the postwar period, when Faulkner published two short pieces in Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle. This chapter argues that Faulkner was aware of this market, targeted it as a publication venue, and shaped his fiction based on the conventions of middlebrow domestic fiction. This argument broadens recent investigation of Faulkner’s catholic engagement with print culture to include a women’s reading and writing community consistently overlooked by literary critics.
Helen Southworth
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748642274
- eISBN:
- 9780748651979
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748642274.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Combining literary criticism, book history, biography and sociology, this book weaves together the stories of the lesser known authors, artists and press workers with the canonical names linked to ...
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Combining literary criticism, book history, biography and sociology, this book weaves together the stories of the lesser known authors, artists and press workers with the canonical names linked to the Hogarth Press. Using previously unpublished archived material, it presents case studies on West Indian writer C.L.R. James, Welsh poet Huw Menai, child poet Joan Easdale and American artist E. McKnight Kauffer; and studies the topics of imperialism, the middlebrow, religion, translation, the marketplace and poetry, which dominated the era of their work.Less
Combining literary criticism, book history, biography and sociology, this book weaves together the stories of the lesser known authors, artists and press workers with the canonical names linked to the Hogarth Press. Using previously unpublished archived material, it presents case studies on West Indian writer C.L.R. James, Welsh poet Huw Menai, child poet Joan Easdale and American artist E. McKnight Kauffer; and studies the topics of imperialism, the middlebrow, religion, translation, the marketplace and poetry, which dominated the era of their work.
Alexandra Wilson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190912666
- eISBN:
- 9780190912697
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190912666.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, Opera, History, Western
The epilogue weighs up the evidence provided in the previous chapters and concludes that whilst opera was in some respects almost impossible to categorise in the terms of the 1920s ‘battle of the ...
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The epilogue weighs up the evidence provided in the previous chapters and concludes that whilst opera was in some respects almost impossible to categorise in the terms of the 1920s ‘battle of the brows’—and that such categorisation might even be undesirable—it sat closest to the middlebrow. The epilogue examines similarities and differences between operatic culture in the 1920s and the present day, focusing on performance practices, connections with popular culture, and social relevance. It discusses the current elitism debate in brief and considers what today’s opera companies might learn from the conversations about opera that took place during the 1920s.Less
The epilogue weighs up the evidence provided in the previous chapters and concludes that whilst opera was in some respects almost impossible to categorise in the terms of the 1920s ‘battle of the brows’—and that such categorisation might even be undesirable—it sat closest to the middlebrow. The epilogue examines similarities and differences between operatic culture in the 1920s and the present day, focusing on performance practices, connections with popular culture, and social relevance. It discusses the current elitism debate in brief and considers what today’s opera companies might learn from the conversations about opera that took place during the 1920s.
Tom Ryall
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719064524
- eISBN:
- 9781781703007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719064524.003.0009
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter provides an account of the films of Anthony Asquith, and draws attention to the varied body of work with which he is associated. His works have been positioned in relation to the various ...
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This chapter provides an account of the films of Anthony Asquith, and draws attention to the varied body of work with which he is associated. His works have been positioned in relation to the various directions taken by the British film during the period of his career, and he is regarded as one of the most underrated film directors in British film history. Although not ignored by scholars and critics, Asquith's work has certainly not had anything like the attention enjoyed by his most distinguished contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, and neither has it had the consideration devoted to figures such as Michael Powell and David Lean. The selection represents a diverse career in which art cinema, middlebrow culture, and popular art are reflected, although the films chosen are not intended to indicate any particular ranking in Asquith's career as a whole.Less
This chapter provides an account of the films of Anthony Asquith, and draws attention to the varied body of work with which he is associated. His works have been positioned in relation to the various directions taken by the British film during the period of his career, and he is regarded as one of the most underrated film directors in British film history. Although not ignored by scholars and critics, Asquith's work has certainly not had anything like the attention enjoyed by his most distinguished contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, and neither has it had the consideration devoted to figures such as Michael Powell and David Lean. The selection represents a diverse career in which art cinema, middlebrow culture, and popular art are reflected, although the films chosen are not intended to indicate any particular ranking in Asquith's career as a whole.
Tom Ryall
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719064524
- eISBN:
- 9781781703007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719064524.003.0017
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the ...
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This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.Less
This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.
Cora Kaplan
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748611478
- eISBN:
- 9780748651627
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748611478.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter discusses the middlebrow Victoriana, which depends neither on intrusive authorial presence nor on over-elaborate imitation. It covers the shifting history, politics and aesthetics of ...
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This chapter discusses the middlebrow Victoriana, which depends neither on intrusive authorial presence nor on over-elaborate imitation. It covers the shifting history, politics and aesthetics of postwar fictional Victoriana. Several key novels are examined, including those by A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and John Fowles. These novels have become commercial and critical successes, and also highlight the uneasy relationship of historical fiction between the present and the Victorian past.Less
This chapter discusses the middlebrow Victoriana, which depends neither on intrusive authorial presence nor on over-elaborate imitation. It covers the shifting history, politics and aesthetics of postwar fictional Victoriana. Several key novels are examined, including those by A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and John Fowles. These novels have become commercial and critical successes, and also highlight the uneasy relationship of historical fiction between the present and the Victorian past.
