1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910306633403321

Autore

Holmes Diana <1949->

Titolo

Middlebrow matters : women's reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque / / Diana Holmes [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Liverpool, : Liverpool University Press, 2018

Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2018

ISBN

1-78694-952-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (244 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Contemporary French and francophone cultures ; ; 57

Disciplina

843.91409

Soggetti

French fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

French fiction - 21st century - History and criticism

Women - Books and reading - France - History - 20th century

Women - Books and reading - France - History - 21st century

Women and literature - France - History - 20th century

Women and literature - France - History - 21st century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Jul 2020).

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

<b>An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.<br>Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, 2018.</b><br>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.