The literary 'middle ground', once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters . These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the 'battle of the brows', and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.

The middlebrow is a dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. This book defines the new literary middlebrow through eight key features: middle class, feminized, reverential, commercial, emotional, recreational, earnest and mediated. Case studies include Oprah's Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women’s magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book’s analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity’s broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines extends recent research into modernism’s circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women’s magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism’s public profile.

This innovative study investigates the emergence and impact of the lower middle class on British print culture through the figure of the office clerk. This interdisciplinary work offers important insights into a previously neglected area of social and book history, and explores key works by George Gissing, Forster and JB Priestley.

Chang provides a comprehensive history of late 20th century Taiwanese literature by placing the vibrant local tradition within the contexts of a modernising economy, & a postcolonial, post-Cold War world order.

This book examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines.

In Writing for the Masses: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition Dr. Christine A. Colón explores how Sayers carefully negotiates the complexities of early twentieth century literary culture by embracing a specifically Victorian literary tradition of writing to engage a wide audience. Using a variety of examples from Sayers’s detective fiction, essays, and religious drama, Dr. Colón charts Sayers’s development as a writer whose intense desire to connect with her audience eventually compels her to embrace the role of a Victorian sage for her own age. Ultimately, the Victorian literary tradition not only provides her with an empowering model for her own work as she struggles as a writer of detective fiction to balance her integrity as an artist with her desire to reach a mass audience but also facilitates her growth as a public intellectual as she strives to help her nation recover from the devastation of World War II.

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon—celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers—Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield—who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today. Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers—as well as their gender—affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination. The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

Embraced for the dramatic opportunities afforded by a house full of strangers, the British boarding house emerged as a setting for novels published during the interwar period by a diverse range of women writers from Stella Gibbons to Virginia Woolf. To use the single room in the boarding house or bedsit, Terri Mullholland argues, is to foreground a particular experience. While the single room represents the freedoms of independent living available to women in the early twentieth century, it also marks the precariousness of unmarried women’s lives. By placing their characters in this transient space, women writers could explore women's changing social roles and complex experiences – amateur prostitution, lesbian relationships, extra-marital affairs, and abortion – outside traditional domestic narrative concerns. Mullholland presents new readings of works by canonical and non-canonical writers, including Stella Gibbons, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Virginia Woolf. A hybrid of the modernist and realist domestic fiction written and read by women, the literature of the single room merges modernism's interest in interior psychological states with the realism of precisely documented exterior spaces, offering a new mode of engagement with the two forms of interiority.

The Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Arts and Culture offers a comprehensive overview of sociology of art and culture, focusing especially – though not exclusively – on the visual arts, literature, music, and digital culture. Extending, and critiquing, Bourdieu’s influential analysis of cultural capital, the distinguished international contributors explore the extent to which cultural omnivorousness has eclipsed highbrow culture, the role of age, gender and class on cultural practices, the character of aesthetic preferences, the contemporary significance of screen culture, and the restructuring of popular culture. The Handbook critiques modes of sociological determinism in which cultural engagement is seen as the simple product of the educated middle classes. The contributions explore the critique of Eurocentrism and the global and cosmopolitan dimensions of cultural life. The book focuses particularly on bringing cutting edge ‘relational’ research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, to bear on these debates. This handbook not only describes the field, but also proposes an agenda for its development which will command major international interest.