Recognizing the Literary Middlebrow

Abstract

Phrenology, the linking of skull shape with intellectual abilities, has long been discredited as a pseudoscience with racist undertones. Yet the language of brows it inspired — highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow — continues to influence the way we think about literary culture. Despite radical transformations in the publishing industry including globalization and digitization, some of our ideas about books remain stable. We still have an impulse to judge their quality; we still have a sense that books are organized according to some sort of hierarchy. The central point in this hierarchy is the middlebrow and in the twenty-first century it is increasingly visible, with more economic and cultural influence than either elite works or mass-market fiction. The middlebrow today is personalized book recommendations on Amazon, or a café in the middle of an independent bookstore. It is a literary prize’s Twitter feed or a movie star’s sold-out appearance at a writers’ festival. It is online cultural magazines such as Salon.com and Slate.com, or a book club that watches Austen TV adaptations. These practices in today’s book culture are descended from the middlebrow culture of the mid twentieth century, linked by the shared possession of distinctive characteristics.