Abstract
This article looks at some aspects of the idea of a ‘middle way’ in America in the 1910s and how it was viewed as undesirable even though at least one influential critic appears, initially, to have suggested the opposite. I use two seminal texts: ‘ “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow” ’ by Van Wyck Brooks (1915) and The Seven Lively Arts by Gilbert Seldes (1924). Seldes’s essay collection is commonly (but erroneously) held to be the first to attempt an extended serious critical evaluation of ‘popular’ culture, and in it Seldes protests very strongly against the taste of the ‘middle class’. Between Brooks and Seldes, a number of ‘littlemagazines’ strongly positioned themselves against the middle ground, often associating it with puritan repression or the American ‘genteel tradition’. These publications applied their critical ideas of taste to a wide cultural field of literature and the arts.
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Notes
Van Wyck Brooks (1915; 1958) America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: Doubleday), pp. 3–4.
Gilbert Seldes (1924; 2001) The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Dover Publications) reprint of Harper Brothers’ 1924 edition.
8. See George Santayana (1967) ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’, in The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), for an originating view.
Dreiser (February 1917) ‘Life, Art, and America’, The Seven Arts, 1(4), 363–389, 363.
Hiram K. Moderwell (July 1917) ‘A Modest Proposal’, The Seven Arts, 2(3),
15. Robert J. Coady (ed.) (December 1916–July 1917) The Soil, 1(1–1), 5.
R. J. Coady (December 1916) ‘letter’ to Jean Crotti, The Soil, 1(1), 32–34.
R. J. Coady (December 1916) from ‘American Art’, The Soil, 1(1), 3.
Charles J. Maland (1989) Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
19. R. J. Coady (July 1917) ‘The Indeps’, The Soil, 1(5), 207.
. Pierre Bourdieu (1979; 1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 48
Allan and Louise Norton (eds) (1915) Rogue, 1(1), 4.
Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich (1946) The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 89 puts The Masses’s circulation at 14,000. Rebecca Zurier (1988) in Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press) gives a figure of 20,000–40,000 copies
Carl R. Dolmetsch (1966) The Smart Set: A History and Anthology (New York: Dial Press), p. 79.
Willard H. Wright (March 1913) ‘Something Personal’, The Smart Set 39(3), 159, quoted in Sharon Hamilton (1999) ‘The First New Yorker? The Smart Set Magazine,1900–1924’, The Serials Librarian 37(2), 92.
Quoted in Michael Murphy (1996) ‘ “One Hundred Per Cent Bohemia”: Pop Decadence and the Aestheticization of Commodity in the Rise of the Slicks’, Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt (1996) Marketing Modernisms: Self- Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 61–89, 63
Willard Huntington Wright (1915) Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning (New York: John Lane).
See discussion of Philo Vance in Julian Symons (1972) Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber and Faber), pp. 110–113.
33. See Joyce Wexler (1997) Who Paid For Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (Fayetteville: University of Kansas Press), particularly the chapter on D. H. Lawrence
34. See Susan Hegeman (1999) Patterns For America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press), especially ch. 5, ‘The Culture of the Middle’, pp. 126–157.
George Santayana, letter to Van Wyck Brooks, 22 May 1927, in Daniel Cory (ed.) (1955) The Letters of George Santayana (New York: Scribner), pp. 225–226
Alan Yentob (21 July 2009) radio programme ‘Art in Troubled Times: A New Deal for Art’ broadcast
40. Kingham (2005) ‘Seven Arts, 7 Lively Arts and American Cultural Criticism’ (unpublished M. Phil thesis), Cambridge University
41 Gilbert Osofsky (Summer 1965) ‘Symbols of the Jazz Age: The New Negro and Harlem Discovered’, American Quarterly 17(2), part 1, 229–238; LindaMizejewski (1999) Ziegfeld Girl (Durham: Duke University Press); Ralph Ellison (1968) Shadow and Act (London: Secker & Warburg); James Weldon Johnson (1928) ‘Dilemma of the Negro Author’, The American Mercury; and the introductory comments of Jeffrey C. Stewart (1983) in The Critical Temper of Alain Locke (New York: Garland).
Michael North (1994) The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth- Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 150.
Mary Ann Calo (September 1999) ‘African American Art and Critical Discourse Between Two World Wars’, American Quarterly 51(3), 580–621.
44. Janice Radway (Spring 1988) ‘The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: On the Uses of “Serious” Fiction’, Critical Inquiry, 14(3), 516–538, 538. My italics.
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© 2012 Victoria Kingham
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Kingham, V. (2012). The Excluded Middle: Cultural Polemics and Magazines in America, 1915–1933. In: Brown, E., Grover, M. (eds) Middlebrow Literary Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354647_8
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