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

• Autore: Holmes Diana <1949->
• Pubblicazione: Liverpool, : Liverpool University Press, 2018; Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2018
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (244 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Disciplina: 843.91409
• Soggetto topico: 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
• Soggetto non controllato: Languages; Literary studies; fiction; novelists & prose writers; France; English; French
• 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Middlebrow matters
• ISBN: 1-78694-952-0
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910306633403321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
• Serie: Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures