Middlebrow matters : : women's reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque / / Diana Holmes.
<b>An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.<br>Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, 2018.</b><br>This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in Franc...
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Place / Publishing House: | Liverpool : : Liverpool University Press,, 2018. |
Year of Publication: | 2018 |
Language: | English |
Series: | Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
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Physical Description: | 1 online resource (244 pages) :; digital, PDF file(s). |
Notes: | Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Jul 2020). |
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Summary: | <b>An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.<br>Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, 2018.</b><br>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 tendency 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 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. It concludes with a double reading of a single text, from the perspective of an academic critic, and from that of a middlebrow reader. |
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ISBN: | 1786949520 |
Hierarchical level: | Monograph |
Statement of Responsibility: | Diana Holmes. |