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

• Tác giả: Diana Holmes
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• ISBN-10: 1786941562
• ISBN-10: 1786949520
• ISBN-13: 978-1786941565
• ISBN-13: 978-1786949523
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 843.9120993 French fiction
• Thông tin xuất bản: Liverpool : Liverpool Liverpool University Press, 2020
• Mô tả vật lý: 1 online resource (1 online resource 244 pages)
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 196592
• Chủ đề: 1. Feminism in literature; 3. French fiction--Women authors; 4. French fiction--Women authors; 5. French fiction--History and criticism--20th century; 6. French fiction; 7. LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French; 8. Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers; 9. Literature; 10. Social classes in literature; 12. Women--Social conditions; 13. Women--Social conditions--20th century--France; 14. Women and literature--History--20th century--France; 15. Women and literature

Tóm tắt

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.