The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction: Identifying the Middlebrow, the Masculine and Mr Miniver

   • Kate Macdonald

   Pages 1-23

3. Reading Class, Examining Men: Anthologies, Education and Literary Cultures

   • Sue McPherson

   Pages 24-37

4. The Evolution of the Masculine Middlebrow: Gissing, Bennett and Priestley

   • Clive E. Hill

   Pages 38-55

5. ‘Watching the Papers Daily in Fear and Trembling’: The Boer War and the Invention of Masculine Middlebrow Literary Culture

   • Jonathan Wild

   Pages 56-72

6. Professionalism and the Cultural Politics of Work in the Sherlock Holmes Stories

   • Clare Clarke

   Pages 73-89

7. From Holmes to the Drones: Fantasies of Men without Women in the Masculine Middlebrow

   • Nicola Humble

   Pages 90-103

8. Healing Landscapes and Evolving Nationalism in Interwar Canadian Middlebrow Fiction of the First World War

   • Amy Tector

   Pages 104-118

9. ‘Everybody’s Essayist’: On Middles and Middlebrows

   • Caroline Pollentier

   Pages 119-134

10. Modernity and the Gendering of Middlebrow Book Culture in Australia

    • David Carter

    Pages 135-149

11. ‘Mind’s Middle Distances’: Men of Letters in Interwar New Zealand

    • Christopher Hilliard

    Pages 150-161

12. The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell

    • Anna Vaninskaya

    Pages 162-176

13. The Collaborator, the Tyrant and the Resistance: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Masculine ‘Middlebrow’ England in the Second World War

    • Ann Rea

    Pages 177-194

14. Back Matter

    Pages 195-228

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Who was the early twentieth-century masculine middlebrow reader? How did his reading choices respond to his environment? This book looks at British middlebrow writing and reading from the late Victorian period to the 1950s and examines the masculine reader and author, and how they challenged feminine middlebrow and literary modernism.

• culture
• fiction
• George Orwell
• Modernism
• British and Irish Literature

"Both forceful and elegant, the essays in this collection evince the myriad ways in which middlebrow readers found radical, challenging ideas at every turn. And, perhaps more importantly, they sketch out how popular reading tastes played a central role in establishing new male identities for an expanding middle class in a world reshaped by industrialization, world wars, universal education and female suffrage. In allowing us a glimpse of this process, The Masculine Middlebrow encourages a reappraisal of some fundamental assumptions about the past hundred years of British literature." Edward White, TLS

"This is a superb and much-needed collection of essays, which proves that 'middlebrow' is not necessarily 'feminine'. It greatly enriches our understanding of middlebrow cultural production by its attention to journalism and periodical culture, anthologies and education, politics and colonial contexts. The line-up of contributors is remarkably fine, and their work demonstrates a wide range of possible approaches to the study of the middlebrow." Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, AHRC Middlebrow Network leader

"The collection covers an impressive amount of ground and constructs a nuanced, complex, and fascinating network of literary forms, authors and critics, publishing venues, and commercial strategies. I cannot do justice in this limited space to the many fine essays Macdonald brings together. While some of the essays have a stronger connection to the nineteenth century than others, all are richly informative. The thoughtful considerations of social, cultural, and commercial transformations and their effects on literature and representations of gender form an immensely valuable back (or belated) formation against which to reread late Victorian literary culture." Teresa Mangum, Victorian Studies Review

• Department of Literature, University of Ghent, Belgium

  Kate Macdonald

DAVID CARTER Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia CLARE CLARKE Doctoral Researcher, School of English, Queen's University Belfast, UK CLIVE E HILL University of London International Programme, UK CHRISTOPHER HILLIARD Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow, University of Sydney, Australia NICOLA HUMBLE Professor of English Literature, Roehampton University, UK SUE MCPHERSON Lecturer in English Literature, Sheffield Hallam University, UK CAROLINE POLLENTIER Doctoral Student, University of Paris 7, France ANNE REA Lecturer in English Literature, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, USA AMY TECTOR Photo Archivist, Library and Archives, Canada ANNA VANINSKAYA Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK JONATHAN WILD Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK

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