Middlebrow Made Masculine

Kate Macdonald’s edited collection The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read reconsiders the relationships between middlebrow literary cultures and masculinity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The twelve essays collected here deliberately depart from the recent scholarly practice of viewing middlebrow texts from feminine/ist perspectives, and instead approach middlebrow texts through frameworks of masculinity. Additionally, all of the essays propose a variety of economic and institutional contexts from which middlebrow culture is inseparable, in order to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of middlebrow literary production and reading patterns during the long modernist period. Thus the volume examines middlebrow culture’s relationship to artistic modernism even as it challenges the tendency among scholars to theorize middlebrow culture with a bias towards feminine writers and women readers.