In the 1920s and 1930s the Modern Library series began to bring out cheap editions of modernist works. Jaillant provides a thorough analysis of the series’ mix of highbrow and popular literature and argues that the availability and low cost of modernist works helped to expand modernism's influence as a literary movement.

Eleanor Dark (1901–85) is one of Australia’s most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark’s contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976. Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark’s writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark’s writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism. Melinda Cooper argues that Dark’s fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century. Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark’s fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.

"At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This provocative study is situated at the intersection of the history, historiography, and aesthetics of twentieth-century music. It uses Benjamin Britten's operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the 'great divide' between modernism and mass culture. Reviving midcentury discussions of the 'middlebrow,' Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how these works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it too: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on key moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, Middlebrow Modernism offers a powerful model for recovering shades of gray in the previously black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music"--Provided by publishe

This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. It asks what middlebrow means, and applies the term positively to explore the 'poetics' of the types of novel that have attracted 'ordinary' fiction readers - in their majority female - since the end of the 19th century.

This collection of essays demonstrates the usefulness of looking at cinema with the analytical methods provided by art theory. "The Visual Turn" is a dialogue between art historians and film theorists from the silent period to the aftermath of World War II.

Situated at the intersection between the history, historiography and aesthetics of twentieth-century music, this study uses Benjamin Britten's operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics and audiences mediated the "great divide" between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the "middlebrow," Chowrimootoo demonstrates how these works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism and theatrical spectacle, even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, Middlebrow Modernism offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Explores the connections between literature and progressive politics in the publication of women's fiction.