The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950

What Mr. Miniver Read

K. Macdonald

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780230290792
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230316577
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Who was the early twentieth-century masculine middlebrow reader? How did his reading choices respond to his environment? This book looks at British middlebrow writing and reading from the late Victorian period to the 1950s and examines the masculine reader and author, and how they challenged feminine middlebrow and literary modernism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Identifying the Middlebrow, the Masculine and Mr Miniver
• 2 Reading Class, Examining Men: Anthologies, Education and Literary Cultures
• 3 The Evolution of the Masculine Middlebrow: Gissing, Bennett and Priestley
• 4 ‘Watching the Papers Daily in Fear and Trembling’: The Boer War and the Invention of Masculine Middlebrow Literary Culture
• 5 Professionalism and the Cultural Politics of Work in the Sherlock Holmes Stories
• 6 From Holmes to the Drones: Fantasies of Men without Women in the Masculine Middlebrow
• 7 Healing Landscapes and Evolving Nationalism in Interwar Canadian Middlebrow Fiction of the First World War
• 8 ‘Everybody’s Essayist’: On Middles and Middlebrows
• 9 Modernity and the Gendering of Middlebrow Book Culture in Australia
• 10 ‘Mind’s Middle Distances’: Men of Letters in Interwar New Zealand
• 11 The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell
• 12 The Collaborator, the Tyrant and the Resistance:The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Masculine ‘Middlebrow’ England in the Second World War
• Bibliography
• Index