Middlebrow

Belphégor 15-2, Décembre 2017

The term ‘middlebrow’ has a strong negative charge. It suggests middle-of-the-road, compromise and insipidity, middle class in an aspirational and snobbish way. The metaphor on which it is based refers back to the discredited nineteenth-century science of phrenology: a high forehead or brow was believed to denote intelligence, a low one its opposite. The hierarchy of brows, however, is not straightforward, for if the ‘high’ and ‘low’ at least have the dignity of the extreme, ‘middlebrow’ is charged with all the opprobrium that attaches to the norm, the median, the merely average. Recently, however, middlebrow culture in Britain and the United States has become the object of scholarly interest and the term has started to be reclaimed as something more than a dismissive epithet. The English word, with all its derogatory connotations, is – as far as we know – unmatched in any other language hence never quite translatable. Yet the phenomenon of the middlebrow itself surely extends beyond Anglophone cultures, and in this volume our aim is to explore the concept’s wider international relevance to cultural history and to the present. We will begin with an outline history of the term itself and its recent critical renaissance in Anglophone scholarship, then introduce the articles collected here through a brief discussion of the questions they collectively address, and the value of this international perspective for the study of the middlebrow.

Diana Holmes

• Introduction: European Middlebrow [Texte intégral]
• Paul Bleton
  Par tous les moyens : territoire du milieu et champ de forces [Texte intégral]
• Jean-Marie Seillan
  « Un genre de roman ni trop haut ni trop bas » : Georges Ohnet et la littérature moyenne [Texte intégral]
• Erica van Boven
  The emergence of the middlebrow novel in the Netherlands: the ‘New Novels’ Series of World Library [Texte intégral]
• Alex Rutten
  Ambivalent gentleman-thieves and ‘the Dutch Conan Doyle’: British-based detective fiction in the Netherlands at the start of the twentieth century [Texte intégral]
• Sándor Kálai
  Cultures moyennes, carrières d’artiste [Texte intégral]
  (Le cas de Ferenc Herczeg – 1863–1954)
• Kristin Bluemel
  Regions, Maps, Readers: Theorizing Middlebrow Geography [Texte intégral]
• Bram Lambrecht, Pieter Verstraeten et Dirk de Geest
  Literary Lessons. Knowledge and Genre in Dutch Middlebrow Fiction of the Interwar Years [Texte intégral]
• Ryanne Keltjens
  Quality Sells [Texte intégral]
  International Bestsellers in the Dutch Literary Field around 1936
• Elke D’hoker et Sarah Bonciarelli
  Extending the Middlebrow: Italian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century [Texte intégral]
• Annamma Varghese
  From crisis to comfort : contemporary bestsellers and the French Middlebrow’s narrative of recovery [Texte intégral]
• David Platten
  Windows of Cognition : Contemporary French Comics and the Cultural Middlebrow[Texte intégral]
• Laura J. Lee Kemp
  The middlebrow Spanish Civil War film: a site of mediation between culture and history. [Texte intégral]
• Isabelle Marc
  Plaisirs et fictions dans la chanson française [Texte intégral]