“Betwixt and Between”: Intersections of Modernism and the Middlebrow

Session Coordinator: Jayne E. Waterman

Affiliation: Ashland Univ.

E-Mail: jwaterma@ashland.edu

“Betwixt and Between” Session One:

“Modernism vs. the Middlebrow at the New Yorker”

The New Yorker of the 1920s and 1930s is one of the more potentially fruitful grounds for study of the interaction between modernism and the middlebrow, particularly from the perspective of class and gender. Despite the magazine’s status as one of the most successful and consistent American mass-market literary periodicals, it has been the target of criticism for its ‘middlebrow’, middle class literary focus. Implicit in this is an unwillingness to engage with high modernist literary experimentation and criticism, and the suggestion that this is tied to commercial imperatives.

The New Yorker, despite being an influential publisher of short fiction and poetry, published virtually none of the canonical high modernists. Rather, it groomed its own writers, using editorial strategies to craft fiction that was distinctly modern yet free from potentially alienating experimentation. As a major player in the American literary marketplace, the New Yorker served as a key liminal area between the modern and the middlebrow, for both writers and readers. As a magazine that deliberately courted female readers, it was the target of criticism implying that its strict editorial censorship was linked to the delicate sensibilities of its female readership.

The ambiguous canonical status of many of its writers, its appeal to both genders, its deliberately targeted readership of college educated but non-intellectual middle-class consumers, and its position as one of the most influential literary publications of the twentieth century, make the New Yorker a necessary part of any investigation into modernism and the middlebrow.

Richard Corey

University of Sydney

Richard.Corey@arts.usyd.edu.au

“The Race of the Middleman: Culture and Advertising in Ezra Pound’s Exile”

In ‘Make It Sell: Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,’ Timothy Materer characterises Ezra Pound as an ‘entrepreneur and advertiser’ during his involvement in Imagism and BLAST, but sees him embracing elitism in the late 1920s. This paper argues that Pound’s interest in advertising and marketing, and his use of techniques drawn from these spheres, continued into his editorship of The Exile. It examines the ways in which the marketing and mediation of culture was bound up in The Exile with ideas of race, from mock advertisements calling for contributions from ‘A few more serious jews’, to his publishing the Jewish writers Carl Rakosi and Louis Zukofsky. Rakosi’s ‘Wanted’ describes a cultural middleman, whose middleness extends to his existing as a mixture of racial identities, black, white and Jewish. In ‘Poem beginning “The”’, Zukofsky mediates his fraught relationship with literary tradition through the figure of John Erskine, who both attempted to shore up the western canon and to sell it to a wide audience with popular ‘middlebrow’ novels. Pound in his correspondence with Louis Zukofsky showed an interest in Harold Scherman’s Book of the Month Club, one example of the ‘middle brow’ literary trends that, Jonathan Freedman argues, were in large part the product of Jewish publishers and booksellers having to invent new ways of marketing literature. Pound’s uneasiness and fascination with the middle ground between high art and a mass audience is shown to play out in racial terms that affect his relationship with both Rakosi and Zukofsky.

Dominic Williams

University of Leeds

d.p.williams@leeds.ac.uk

 
“Middlebrow Parody and the Rise of Modernism”
 
Historically parody has been considered among the most middlebrow of modes. A gauche staple of Anglo-American intellectual weeklies and comic magazines 
since the mid-Victorian period, parody has been conceived as diverting but derivative and is typically associated with unfunny ephemera. Whilst it is obvious 
that recycling of one sort or another is central to Modernism, critics have taken the allusive strategies of quotation and controlled distortion practiced by the 
major Modernists to be different from parody and indeed opposed to it. With the exception of Joyce, parody has been under-recognized and almost entirely 
unacknowledged as a major Modernist mode. Yet parody was one of the Modernists’ primary critical reflexes. For instance, Eliot, Pound and Joyce, all parodied 
each other’s work in their private correspondence. My paper deconstructs the perceived split between middlebrow parody and the allusive practices of high Modernism 
and reveals the shared culture of parody that interpenetrated high and low literature of the teens and twenties.
 
Reading parodies by major Modernists Aldington, Pound and Mansfield (published in Poetry, The New Age and the Egoist), alongside parodies by lesser-known Georgian 
journalists such as Beerbohm, Seaman, and Squire, I explore what the resistance to formal identification with parody reveals about high Modernist writing and our critical 
assumptions. I then indicate the ways in which the middlebrow culture of parody percolates through texts such as The Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 
revealing how selective blindness to the practice of parody has impoverished our appreciation of major Modernist masterpieces.
 

Sarah Davison

St Anne’s College, University of Oxford

sarah.davison@st-annes.ox.ac.uk

“Betwixt and Between” Session Two:

“‘Improper’ Middlebrow: Modernist Apathy to Psychoanalytic Discourse in Post-War Fiction”

This paper seeks to reveal complexities in relations between British Modernist highbrow and middlebrow writing. I argue that modernist highbrows Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot used reviews and polemics, often based on unexamined – and conservative - aesthetic assumptions, to question the legitimacy of, and by implication exclude, certain types of innovation from the highbrow camp. Both Woolf and Eliot objected to the use of psychoanalytic subject matter in early novels probing the fictional potential of this new discourse by middlebrow novelists J.D. Beresford and May Sinclair respectively. Woolf reviewed two novels by Beresford, The Imperfect Mother (1920) and Revolution (1921). About the first she wrote that, “in the ardours of discovery [of the new psychology], Mr. Beresford has unduly stinted his people of flesh and blood. In becoming cases they have ceased to be individuals,” although in the second she praised his characterisation. In reviewing Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1922), T.S. Eliot criticized Sinclair’s use of psychoanalysis “because it is a scientific method, and rests upon a dubious and contentious branch of science.”

Neither Beresford nor Sinclair entered into the modernist canon despite receiving critical acclaim and making innovations in form. Their cases raise questions about whether we need to interrogate our privileging of formal innovations over those in subject matter in our analysis of modernist texts and whether assimilation of psychoanalysis, considered improper or “unpleasant” and antithetical to “art,” might be one among several unjustified reasons for exclusion from the canon.

George M. Johnson

Thompson Rivers University

gjohnson@tru.ca

“Middlebrows in Bloomsbury: Rose Macaulay and E. M. Delafield on Modernism’s ‘Great Divide’”

Much has been recorded, analyzed, and theorized about highbrow modernists’ reactions to the “Middlebrow,” yet our understanding of middlebrows changes when we consider how middlebrows read themselves in relation to highbrows and within the literary public sphere.

Rose Macaulay’s (1881-1958) and E. M. Delafield’s (1890-1943) writing and careers make traditional understandings of the middlebrow problematic because their work defies static readings of either high or middlebrow writing. Macaulay and Delafield published popular and financially successful novels enjoyed by the mass public. They also wrote for Lady Rhondda’s Time and Tide and for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s prestigious Hogarth Press, although neither professed a highbrow status. Indeed, both Macaulay, in Keeping Up Appearances (1928), and Delafield, in the Diary of a Provincial Lady (1931) and The Provincial Lady in London (1933), distinguish themselves from self-professed highbrows and assert their own rights to move within and without of literary London society, specifically in Bloomsbury. By doing so, Macaulay and Delafield respond to highbrow modernists who continually mark them as other by asserting their own insider-outsider positions in literary London. Macaulay’s and Delafield’s theories on the mobile positions of middlebrows during the “brow” wars of the 1920s and 1930s and the broad range of their writing prove that fluid new definitions of the term middlebrow are warranted and that, moreover, middlebrow writers, although subject to the pressures of the literary marketplace, were not powerless in the literary public sphere.

Melissa Sullivan

University of Delaware

melsul@english.udel.edu

“Middlebrow/Modernist? Placing the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers”

In her detective fiction, Dorothy L. Sayers presents a detailed picture of British, interwar society, including its literary and cultural milieu. Contemporary arts and social theories are discussed as her novels move from the world of highbrow, Modernist, literary luncheons, to the wild parties of the studio set, and the middlebrow suburban ‘salons’, all of which are carefully described for her readers as the setting for classic ‘Golden-Age’ detective stories. But where can we place Sayers’ own novels within this world? British, interwar detective fiction is generally acknowledged to be ‘middlebrow’ (at best) – the reading matter of the middle classes, describes by Douglas Hewitt as the ‘crop of partially educated people whose tastes were catered for by the rise of the popular press and of such magazines as Tit-bits and Answers’. Sayers knew this, and used her abilities to appeal to a mass audience, acknowledging that it was ‘bread-and-cheese writing’. She was, however, a very intelligent woman – academic, theologian, dramatist and poet - and this is evident in her fiction, and raises her novels beyond the potential limitations of their genre. This paper explores the tensions in Sayers’ detective fiction, created between a middlebrow genre and a highbrow writer, and explores the dialogues that these texts present concerning brow hierarchies and their own place within the literary canon.

Esme Miskimmin

University of Liverpool

esmem@liv.ac.uk

“Elizabeth Bowen's Arched Brow: Middlebrow Writing and Fragmented Meaning in The Last September ”
 
Elizabeth Bowen's literary status has fluctuated throughout the half century or so since her death. Recently, though, she has received renewed critical attention, perhaps 
most notably in Neil Corcoran's excellent study The Enforced Return and in a forthcoming issue of Modern Fiction Studies. 
 
In this presentation I will argue that Bowen's critical reappraisal must grapple with Bowen's former status as a 'middlebrow' writer. In her 1927 novel of the 
Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, The Last September, Bowen's writing is stylistically and generically middlebrow while her meaning--one might say her ontology—ironically 
undermines these conventions. 

What is experimental, then, is the manner in which the novel subverts the conventional narrative arc of the gothic novel and the Big House romance, leaving readers grasping for the lessons they expect from such writing. Here, unexplained and quite horrifying desires emerge inexplicably on the part of the central heroine, and the glimpses we are given of these desires suggest an unwritten landscape of repressed Anglo-Irish allegiance. Moreover, the novel's trope of surveillance works both in the middlebrow tradition of the gothic yet compellingly disturbs this tradition by substituting the ghosts, vampires, and specters of this tradition for flesh and blood Irish rebels. I’ll contextualize this literary tactic by examining Bowen’s corpus of critical writings and by linking her critique of generic fiction to Virginia Woolf’s late literary experiments.

Brook Miller

University of Minnesota-Morris

brookmiller@charter.net