The Middlebrow and Popular

Abstract

To be classified as ‘popular’ or ‘middlebrow’ is to be damned with imprecise and, often, faint praise. This is particularly true in the 1930s when questions of literary ‘taste’ and ‘value’ increasingly shifted the parameters of critical reception in Britain by drawing distinctions between the popular and highbrow while airing the notion of the ‘middlebrow’ as a third classification. These categorisations accelerated debates about the rise in commercial writing in the period while lamenting the wider effects of mass culture on society. Fundamentally, this discussion became a struggle over ideas of cultural and intellectual authority that broadly coincided with a proliferation of novels written predominantly for a wide readership, particularly of middle-class women, under the classification ‘middlebrow’, as Nicola Humble’s groundbreaking study The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s–1950s establishes.

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