The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction Popular

The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction examines the critically acclaimed, popular novels that were labeled "middlebrow" in the US during the Cold War. This period saw a vogue for the term 'middlebrow,' with articles on the topic in magazines like Harper's and Life; there was even a song about "Middle Brow" taste in Touch and Go, a 1949 Broadway revue. The project treats the middlebrow novel not as marginal but as central to the tradition of American literature. Tom Perrin argues that bestselling novelists such as James Michener, Harper Lee, and Leon Uris were not, as critics often asserted, writing work outmoded by comparison with their modernist peers, but rather adapted the traditional conventions of the novel to represent the modern world.

Tom Perrin is Assistant Professor of English at Huntingdon College, USA. He has published work in American Literature, NOVEL, the Times Literary Supplement, Post45, among others.

Introduction: Remake it New
1. The Old Men and the 'Sea of Masscult': T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and the Middlebrow Aesthetic
2. 'It Offers No Solutions': Ambivalence and Aesthetics in the Social Problem Novel
3. Rebuilding Bildung: The Novel of Aesthetic Education
4. The Second-Greatest Stories Ever Told: Middlebrow Epics of 1959 and the Aesthetics of Disavowal
5. Book Smarts: Masochism and Popular Postmodernism
Conclusion

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The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction Popular US Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945–75

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials