Middlebrow matters : : women's reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque / / Diana Holmes.

• VerfasserIn: Holmes, Diana, 1949-
• Place / Publishing House: Liverpool : : Liverpool University Press,, 2018.
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (244 pages) :; digital, PDF file(s).
• Notes: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Jul 2020).

<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.

Table of Contents

Reclaiming the middlebrow -- The birth of French middlebrow -- Colette: The middlebrow modernist -- Interwar France: The case of the missing middlebrow -- The 'little world' of Françoise Sagan -- Literary prizes, women and the middlebrow -- Realism, romance and self-reflexivity: Twenty-first-century middlebrow -- Conclusion: Marie NDiaye's femme puissante -- a double reading.