Middlebrow and Gender, 1890-1945 (DQR Studies in Literature, 62)

Scholars of the middlebrow have demonstrated that the preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot's famous attack on 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' set the tone for the long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction - a controversy which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows. The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the wider dissemination of new concepts of gender. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1945, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues. Contributors: Nicola Bishop, Elke D'hoker, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Stephanie Eggermont, Christoph Ehland, Wendy Gan, Emma Grundy Haigh, Kate Macdonald, Louise McDonald, Tara MacDonald, Isobel Maddison, Ann Rea, Cornelia Wächter, Alice Wood Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1945 Copyright Contents List of Contributors 1: Introduction: “... All Granite, Fog and Female Fiction” Part 1: Contact Zones 2: The Short Fiction of New Woman Writers in Avant-Garde, Mainstream, and Popular Periodicals of the Fin de Siècle 3: Modernism and the Middlebrow in British Women’s Magazines, 1916-1930 4: Gender, Disability, Wartime: The Woman’s Body and the Disabled Ex-Serviceman in the First World War 5: Complementary Cousins: Constructing the Maternal in the Writing of Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield Part 2: Heroics of the Everyday 6: Middlebrow “Everyman” or Modernist Figurehead? Experiencing Modernity through the Eyes of the Humble Clerk 7: “The Heroine of a Modern Sea Epic”: The New Woman Adventuress in Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl 8: The Adventures of the Lady Typist: Redefining the Heroic in Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Spy Fiction Part 3: Gender, Sexuality, and the Management of Anxiety 9: Clemence Dane’s Fantastical Fiction and Feminist Consciousness 10: The Painted Veil: Re-Inventing the Colonial Woman and the Hinterland Narrative 11: Victoria Cross’ Six Chapters of a Man’s Life: Queering Middlebrow Feminism 12: Middlebrow Negotiations of Lawrentian Sexuality in Una Silberrad’s Desire 13: “Ordinary” Sexuality, the “Dirty Little Secret” and the Indecent Highbrow Modernist: Sexuality in Married Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover Index The preferences and choices of both women writers and women readers have suffered considerably from the dismissive attitude of earlier critics. George Eliot’s famous attack on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ set the tone for a long tradition of gendered disputes over the literary merit of works of fiction which eventually coalesced with a class-based hegemony of taste in the so-called Battle of the Brows.00The new research presented in this volume demonstrates that this gendered inflection of the critical debate is not only fatally one-sided but tends to obfuscate the significance the middlebrow literary spectrum had for the dissemination of new concepts of gender to wider audiences. By exploring the scope of middlebrow media culture between 1890 and 1930, from household magazines to popular novels, the essays in this volume give evidence of the relative proximity that existed between middlebrow writers and the avant-garde in their concern for gender issues