Abstract
Here are Craig Price and Susan Strong, characters from Robert Ruark’s forgotten middlebrow epic Poor No More (1959), on modernist icon William Faulkner:
“I can’t read him, him and that Makalapawhichawaymultnomah County. Posturing bore. Writes in loops. You can take Mr. James Joyce and Miss Stein and…”
“Watch it. There ain’t enough room in there for both of them.”
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Notes
Robert Ruark, Poor No More (New York: Henry Holt, 1959), pp. 194, 158.
See, for example, the essays in Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) none of which treats middlebrow fiction as a stage in the novel’s formal development.
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 141.
On this definition of the fetish, see especially Octave Mannoni, “I Know Well, but All the Same…,” trans. G. M. Goshgarian, in Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster, and Slavoj Zižek (eds.), Perversion and the Social Relation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 68–92.
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto, 1932), p. 24.
See Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 112.
See Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 3–75
Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary 31.3 (1961): 223–33
John Berryman et al., “The State of American Writing: 1948: A Symposium,” Partisan Review 15.8 (1948): 855–93
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (eds.), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), pp. 102, 103.
Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” New Left Review, 1st ser., 175 (May–June 1989): 51.
See, for instance, Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 15.
Williams, Drama From Ibsen to Brecht (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), pp. 17–18.
See, for example, Radway, A Feeling for Books, p. 262, and Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, pp. 144–5. The term “professional-managerial class” comes from Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America 11.2 (1977): 6–31.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
See, for example, James Jones, From Here to Eternity (New York: Dial Press, 2012), p. 503.
Quoted in K. A. Cuordileone, “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960,” Journal of American History 87.2 (2000): 515–45.
Taylor Caldwell, Dear and Glorious Physician (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 282.
James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 321.
Graham Greene, The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed (New York: Criterion Collection, 2007).
See Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, pp. 14–15. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), p. 89.
Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 605–6.
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 211.
See Daniel Tracy, “Investing in ‘Modernism’: Smart Magazines, Parody, and Middlebrow Professional Judgment,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 1.1 (2010): 38–63.
Michener, Literary Reflections: Michener on Michener, Hemingway, Capote, & Others (Austin, TX: State House Press, 1993), p. 149.
Laura Z. Hobson, Laura Z: The Early Years and Years of Fulfillment (New York: Donald A. Fine, 1986), p. 239.
Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist,” Pavannes and Divisions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918), p. 224.
Jeffrey L. Sammons, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarification,” in James Hardin (ed.), Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 41.
Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garc ia Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), p. 1.
On this subject see Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).
Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 566.
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© 2015 Tom Perrin
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Perrin, T. (2015). Introduction: Remake It New. In: The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523952_1
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