Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930

by Kate Macdonald (Editor), Christoph Singer (Editor)

Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930 examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays describe the connections, interstices and transitions from the highbrow and lowbrow into the middlebrow, and illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines. This period saw major changes in the literary and artistic tastes of the cultural elites, the publishing houses, the magazines and the reading public, and so the authors explore the influence of modernism outside elitist territories, examining middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments in the marketplace.

The essays discuss the authors J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, F.M. Crawford, Gustave Flaubert, John Galsworthy, A.S.M. Hutchinson, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Wallace, and H.G. Wells; the critics Henry-D. Davray, Herman Robbers and Charles Marriott; and the magazines To-Day and the Mercure de France.

282 pages, Hardcover

First published March 4, 2015

About the author

Kate Macdonald studied at the University of Aberdeen and University College London, and teaches British literary history at Ghent University, Belgium. A former academic editor, she has published books, book chapters and articles on British publishing history in the later Victorian period and the early twentieth century. She is a leading authority on the fiction of John Buchan, and active in the advancement of middlebrow studies, with an interest in the recovery of forgotten authors. She is a series editor for Pickering & Chatto’s monograph series Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace. Her podcast series on forgotten fiction is at www.reallylikethisbook.com.