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Author: Joan Shelley Rubin Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807864269 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 439
Book Description
The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman. Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.
Author: Joan Shelley Rubin Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807864269 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 439
Book Description
The proliferation of book clubs, reading groups, "outline" volumes, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the tastes and pastimes of millions of Americans. Joan Rubin here provides the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, the rise of American middlebrow culture, and the values encompassed by it. Rubin centers her discussion on five important expressions of the middlebrow: the founding of the Book-of-the-Month Club; the beginnings of "great books" programs; the creation of the New York Herald Tribune's book-review section; the popularity of such works as Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy; and the emergence of literary radio programs. She also investigates the lives and expectations of the individuals who shaped these middlebrow institutions--such figures as Stuart Pratt Sherman, Irita Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John Erskine, William Lyon Phelps, Alexander Woollcott, and Clifton Fadiman. Moreover, as she pursues the significance of these cultural intermediaries who connected elites and the masses by interpreting ideas to the public, Rubin forces a reconsideration of the boundary between high culture and popular sensibility.
Author: Belinda Edmondson Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801448140 Category : Black people Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.
Author: Susan Jacoby Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 1400096383 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
A scathing indictment of American modern-day culture examines the current disdain for logic and evidence fostered by the mass media, religious fundamentalism, poor public education, a lack of fair-minded intellectuals, and a lazy, credulous public, condemning our addiction to infotainment, from TV to the Web, and assessing its repercussions for the country as a whole. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
Author: Jonathan M. Hess Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804774234 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.
Author: Sally Faulkner Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 131724740X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Middlebrow Cinema challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and feminized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution. In exploring the concept of the middlebrow, this book recovers films that were widely meaningful to contemporary audiences, yet sometimes overlooked by critics interested in popular and arthouse extremes. It also addresses the question of socially-mobile audiences, who might express their aspirations through film-watching; and traces the cultural consequences of the movement of films across borders and between institutions. The first study of its kind, the volume comprises 11 original essays that test the purchase of the term ‘middlebrow’ across cultures, including those of Europe, Asia and the Americas, from the 1930s to the present day. Middlebrow Cinema brings into view a popular and aspirational - and thus especially relevant and dynamic - area of film and film culture. Ideal for students and researchers in this area, this book: Remaps ‘Popular’ and ‘arthouse’ approaches Explores British, Chinese, French, Indian, Mexican, Spanish ‘national’ cinemas alongside Continental, Hollywood, Queer, Transnational cinemas Analyses Biopic, Heritage, Historical Film, Melodrama, Musical, Sex Comedy genres.
Author: Hal Lindsey Publisher: Zondervan ISBN: 0310531063 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 149
Book Description
The impact of The Late Great Planet Earth cannot be overstated. The New York Times called it the "no. 1 non-fiction bestseller of the decade." For Christians and non-Christians of the 1970s, Hal Lindsey's blockbuster served as a wake-up call on events soon to come and events already unfolding -- all leading up to the greatest event of all: the return of Jesus Christ. The years since have confirmed Lindsey's insights into what biblical prophecy says about the times we live in. Whether you're a church-going believer or someone who wouldn't darken the door of a Christian institution, the Bible has much to tell you about the imminent future of this planet. In the midst of an out-of-control generation, it reveals a grand design that's unfolding exactly according to plan. The rebirth of Israel. The threat of war in the Middle East. An increase in natural catastrophes. The revival of Satanism and witchcraft. These and other signs, foreseen by prophets from Moses to Jesus, portend the coming of an antichrist . . . of a war which will bring humanity to the brink of destruction . . . and of incredible deliverance for a desperate, dying planet.
Author: Joan Shelley Rubin Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469644177 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
The career of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) is one of the richest examples of the American writer's search for a "usable past." In this first full-length study of Rourke, Joan Shelley Rubin establishes the context for Rourke's defense of American culture -- the controversies that engaged her, the books that influenced her thinking, the premises that lay beneath her vocabulary. With the aid of Rourke's unpublished papers, the author explores her responses to issues that were compelling for her generation of intellectuals: the critique of America as materialistic and provincial; the demand for native traditions in the arts; the modern understanding of the nature of culture and myth; and the question of a critic's role in a democracy. Rourke's writings demonstrate that America did not suffer, as Van Wyck Brooks and others had maintained, from a damaging split between "high-brow" and "low-brow" but was rather a rich, unified culture in which the arts could thrive. Her classic American Humor (1931) and her biographies of Lotta Crabtree, Davy Crockett, Audubon, and Charles Sheeler celebrate the American as mythmaker. To foster what she called the "possession" of the national heritage, she used an evocative prose style accessible to a wide audience and depicted the frontier in more abstract terms than did other contempoaray scholars. Her commitment to social reform, acquired in her youth and strengthened at Vassar in the Progressive era, informed her sense of the function of criticism and guided her political activites in the 1930s. Drawing together Rourke's varied discussions of popular heroes, comic lore, literature, and art, Rubin illuminates the delicate balances and sometimes contradictory arguments underlying Rourke's description of America's cultural patterns. She also analyzes the way Rourke's encounters with the ideas of Van Wyck Brooks, Ruth Benedict, Jane Harrison, Bernard DeVoto, and Lewis Mumford shaped her view of America's achievements and possibilities. Rourke emerges not simply as a follower of Brooks or as a colleague of De Voto, nor even as an antiquarian or folklorist. Rather, she assumes her own unique and proper place -- as a pioneer who, more than anyone else of her day, boldly and eloquently showed Americans that they had the resources necessary for the future of both art and society. By placing Constance Rourke within the framework of a debate about the nature of American culture, the author makes a notable contribution to American intellectual history. Originally published in 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Author: Dwight Macdonald Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 159017447X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
Author: Joan Shelley Rubin
Author: Joan Shelley Rubin
Author: Victoria Grieve
Author: Belinda Edmondson
Author: Joan S. Rubin
Author: Susan Jacoby
Author: Jonathan M. Hess
Author: Sally Faulkner
Author: Hal Lindsey
Author: Joan Shelley Rubin
Author: Dwight Macdonald