The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s PDF Download

Author: Nicola Humble
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199269334
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Humble presents a study of the novels by and for middle-class women that dominated the publishing market in the first half of the 20th century. She studies the work of authors such as Agatha Christie alongside cultural products such as cookery books.

Author: Erica Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317320735
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor wrote witty and entertaining novels about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Widely read and enjoyed, their work was often dismissed as middlebrow. Brown argues their skilful use of comedy and irony provided the receptive reader with subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life.

Author: Lisa Regan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443818240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Winifred Holtby, “A Woman In Her Time”: Critical Essays brings together for the first time a range of scholarly perspectives on one of Britain’s best-loved regional authors. Remembered for her vivid portrayal of 1930s rural Yorkshire in her final novel, South Riding (1936) and for her friendship with Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) has become a key figure for those interested in British literature, politics, and culture between the wars. Epitomising the professional independence and political passion which we have come to associate with the newly emancipated women of her era, Holtby’s was a life devoted to myriad causes and directed to the pressing issues of her day. With fresh perspectives on Holtby’s better known novels alongside new critical forays into her short stories, drama, journalism, and historical writing, Winifred Holtby, “A Woman In Her Time” sheds new light on a woman who not only spoke out in support of feminism, peace, and racial equality at a time when fascism and war loomed, but who also shared with us her views on a wide spectrum of topical concerns from Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, psychology, spinsters, mothers, and the B.B.C., to her delight in clothes, films, and village gossip.

Author: M. Joannou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137292172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Author: Melinda J. Cooper
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743328664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
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.

Author: Isobel Maddison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317145062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In the first book-length treatment of Elizabeth von Arnim's fiction, Isobel Maddison examines her work in its historical and intellectual contexts, demonstrating that von Arnim's fine comic writing and complex and compelling narrative style reward close analysis. Organised chronologically and thematically, Maddison's book is informed by unpublished material from the British and Huntington Libraries, including correspondence between von Arnim, her publishers and prominent contemporaries such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and her cousin Katherine Mansfield -- whose early modernist prose is seen as indebted to von Arnim's earlier literary influence. Maddison's exploration of the novelist's critical reception is situated within recent discussions of the ’middlebrow’ and establishes von Arnim as a serious author among her intellectual milieu, countering the misinformed belief that the author of such novels as Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Caravaners, The Pastor's Wife and Vera wrote light-hearted fiction removed from gritty reality. On the contrary, various strands of socialist thought and von Arnim's wider political beliefs establish her as a significant author of British anti-invasion literature while weighty social issues underpin much of her later writing.

Author: Mary Eagleton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405183136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Now in its third edition, Feminist Literary Theory remains the most comprehensive, single volume introduction to a vital and diverse field Fully revised and updated to reflect changes in the field over the last decade Includes extracts from all the major critics, critical approaches and theoretical positions in contemporary feminist literary studies Features a new section, Writing 'Glocal', which covers feminism's dialogue with postcolonial, global and spatial studies Revised chapter introductions provide readers with helpful contextual information while extensive notes offer recommendations for further reading

Author: M. Schaub
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137276967
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This is a feminist study of a recurring character type in classic British detective fiction by women - a woman who behaves like a Victorian gentleman. Exploring this character type leads to a new evaluation of the politics of classic detective fiction and the middlebrow novel as a whole.

Author: Juliane Römhild
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611477042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
When Elizabeth von Arnim anonymously published her debut Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), she became a literary star overnight. The mystery surrounding the identity of this witty aristocratic diarist in her romantic garden kept readers guessing: Who was Elizabeth? A Prussian Princess? The daughter of Queen Victoria? Throughout her long and successful career as one of England’s best satirical novelists, von Arnim never officially revealed her identity. Instead, to her readers and friends she simply became known as “Elizabeth.” From her first book to her capricious autobiography All the Dogs of My Life (1936), throughout her career von Arnim would explore questions of identity and self-representation. And in spite of von Arnim’s love of masquerades and guises, her books include funny and surprisingly personal meditations on the challenges of being a woman writer wrestling with a masculine literary tradition, of taking pride in one’s commercial success while moving in Modernist circles, and of being both a hard-working professional and an elegant hostess. In tracing the conflict between femininity and authorship in von Arnim’s works, this book engages with key literary issues of the time. Von Arnim’s early books offer a witty critique of New Woman fiction. Von Arnim’s self-positioning on the literary market and her relationships with writers like Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf shed light on the relationship between middlebrow and modernist literature. Von Arnim’s complex autobiography, finally, gives a tentative answer to the all-important question: can a writing woman be a lady?

Author: J.C. Bernthal
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147662397X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
When Agatha Christie died in 1976, she was the bestselling mystery writer in history. This collection of new essays brings fresh perspectives to Christie scholarship with new readings and discussions of little-known aspects of her life, career and legacy. The contributors explore her relationship with modernism, the relevance of queer theory, television adaptations, issues with translations, information behavior theory, feminist readings, postcolonial tribute novels, celebrity culture and heritage cinema. The final word is given to fans in an editorial that collates testimonies from readers, collectors and enthusiasts.