| Series |
Contemporary French and francophone cultures ; 57
Contemporary French and francophone cultures ; 57. ^A772988
|
| 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. |
| Abstract |
"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."--Page 4 of cover. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-237) and index. |
| Terms of use | Current Copyright Fee: GBP17.50 0. |
| Genre/form | Criticism, interpretation, etc. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| ISBN | 1786941562 |
| ISBN | 9781786941565 |
