The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century

235 Pages·2014·0.912 MB·English

by  Beth Driscoll (auth.)

The New Literary Middlebrow
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The New Literary
Middlebrow
Tastemakers and Reading in the
Twenty-First Century
Beth Driscoll
Lecturer, University of Melbourne, Australia
© Beth Driscoll 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-40291-2
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-48684-7 ISBN 978-1-137-40292-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137402929
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Driscoll, Beth, author.
The new literary middlebrow : tastemakers and reading in the twenty-fi rst
century / Beth Driscoll, Lecturer, University of Melbourne, Australia.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature and society—History—21st century. 2. Popular literature—
History and criticism. 3. Books and reading—History—21st century.
I. Title.
PN51.D73 2014
809'.93358—dc23 2014018831
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Recognizing the Literary Middlebrow 5
2 Book Clubs, Oprah, Women and the Middlebrow 45
3 Harry Potter and the Middlebrow Pedagogies of
Teachers and Reviewers 83
4 The Man Booker Prize: Money, Glory and Media Spectacle 119
5 The Middlebrow Pleasures of Literary Festivals 152
Conclusion: the Future of Reading 194
Bibliography 202
Index 220
v
Acknowledgements
Some sections of this book are revised versions of material that has
appeared earlier, in my articles ‘Using Harry Potter to teach literacy:
Different approaches’, Cambridge Journal of Education 43 (2): 259–71
(2013), ‘How prizes work in the literary economy’, HEAT Literary Journal
(4): 175–90 (2008) and my book chapter excerpted by permission of
the Publishers from ‘ “Not the normal kind of chicklit”? Richard &
Judy and the Feminized Middlebrow’, in The Richard & Judy Book Club
Reader eds. Jenni Ramone and Helen Cousins (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011),
pp. 109–20. Copyright © 2011.
I have been given generous support and assistance in putting together
the primary research for this book. I would like to acknowledge the
assistance of Chris Fowler and the staff at the Booker Prize Archive in
the Special Collections of the Oxford Brookes Library; Lisa Dempster,
Director of the Melbourne Writers Festival; Sam Twyford-Moore,
Director of the Emerging Writers Festival; Tess Brady, Chair of Creative
Clunes Inc. and Melissa Kennedy at La Trobe University. My research
assistant, Miranda Webster, did a terrific job, especially of wrangling
literary festival audience data into more meaningful and manageable
shape.
Many of the ideas in this book were initially developed while I was
studying for my doctorate, and my supervisors Ken Gelder and Mark
Davis at the University of Melbourne were wonderful sources of feed-
back, advice and ideas. My colleagues Sarah French and Sybil Nolan
at the University of Melbourne and David Carter at the University of
Queensland read early drafts of this work and provided insightful sug-
gestions on how to extend and enrich its arguments.
I am grateful to my mother, Sue, for allowing me to quote from the
letters written to her by my grandfather and for her unfailing encour-
agement. Thank you to my children, Julia and Benjamin, who have
been very patient. I promise I’ll have more time now to read Fancy
Nancy and Steam Train, Dream Train with you. Finally, this book is dedi-
cated to my partner Clay Manning, who has supported me in innumer-
able practical and thoughtful ways. The way you described my writing
when we first met still makes me laugh; this piece of ‘claptrap for the
chattering classes’ is for you.
vi
Introd uction
The word middlebrow is magnetic. Whenever I drop it into conversa-
tion, I get an immediate reaction from people: a slightly defensive
stiffening and a glint of curiosity, a desire to use the word themselves
and see what happens. Even when it is unfashionable or mildly taboo,
the word middlebrow lies ready just under the surface of conversations
about culture. It carries an immensely seductive promise that a hidden
structure organizes culture, and a judgmental sting that makes us anx-
ious about where we fit. A term with this kind of impact is not going to
disappear, and if the word middlebrow has such power then it should be
used with care. The middlebrow should be more than a quick, lazy label.
It would be naïve to think that the negative connotations of the word
can be ignored. However, middlebrow is not just an insult. The mid-
dlebrow can be talked about in a way that raises the level of cultural
debate beyond gatekeeping and culture wars. The way forward lies in a
full, detailed account of middlebrow culture that acknowledges it as a
distinctive cultural formation with both a history and a contemporary
presence. To date, most scholarship on the middlebrow has focused on
the early to mid-twentieth century period when it emerged. This book
extends such research by exploring the middlebrow in a contemporary
context, while maintaining its connection with a longer history of cul-
tural activity.
My own relationship with the middlebrow also has a history: in no
way does the work in this book come from a position outside culture.
The immediate background to this book is my doctorate in literary and
publishing studies, which I began by asking the question: why do some
books become popular? I had been reading all my life, both for pleasure
and through my undergraduate degree, and now I wanted to know what
the bigger picture looked like. Who was choosing the books that made
an impact on me? Teachers, publishers, reviewers, bookshop owners?
How did they make their choices? What factors determined whether a
book became a critical hit or a massive word-of-mouth success? What I
found as I surveyed twenty-first century publishing and literary culture
was that the dominant books not only had artistic appeal but were
also enmeshed in a commercial context; despite persistent rhetoric
that opposes art and money, a lot of the time they work together. I
also found that the books with the highest profile were presented to
1
2 The New Literary Middlebrow
the public by powerful intermediaries: Oprah Winfrey, the Man Booker
Prize, film adaptations, schools. Gradually, I realized that there was a
word to describe this pattern: the middlebrow.
There is a deeper history at work here for me, too. The way I look at
culture is shaped by generations of particular cultural practices: of class
movement, commitment to education and shared cultural passions. I
recently read some letters which my grandfather wrote to my mother,
describing the early days of his relationship with my grandmother.
David and Maysie lived in the small town of Oak Flats, near the coast
in New South Wales. David, two years older, came from a family that
took an interest in culture: his parents gave ‘polished renditions of the
old drawing-room ballads such as “Come Into the Garden, Maude” and
“Alice, Where Art Thou?’’, were ‘avid readers of popular fiction with
mother delving deeper into more serious novels’ and ‘in the visual arts
they both loved soft watercolours’.
Maysie had emigrated from Scotland as a teenager with her parents
under the post-war assisted migrant scheme. In Oak Flats, she and
David began moving in the same circle, though they pursued different
romantic attachments. As my grandfather writes it, their cultural inter-
ests finally brought them together: ‘she shared with me a passion for
reading, for art, for music, opera and ballet’.
My grandfather’s letter suggests that Maysie’s appreciation for culture
may have surprised people. Growing up, she had little exposure to lit-
erature, music or the fine arts, which ‘was always a source of regret to
her’. Her love for culture seems to have sprung from the time she spent
as a child during World War II living with a family in the hinterland
of Scotland. There, David writes, ‘she was exposed to what was then
perceived as being good quality literature and music and she took to
it with relish’. In Australia, Maysie was ‘a beach girl, a party girl’, but
this was only part of who she was: ‘she dived headlong into the exhila-
rating world of art, music, opera and ballet that opened to her in her
widening experience . . . She would read Omar’s Rubaiyat for hours
on end wanting to enter his world of early existentialism, or would lie
quietly listening to music’.
David and Maysie read poetry ‘quite indiscriminately, from the
Australian ballads to Eliot and Pound’ and listened to ballets and ope-
ras on records and on radio programs such as World Famous Tenors.
Although they had never seen a live opera, they attended ‘the Youth
and Adult series of concerts staged in those days by the A.B.C. in pro-
vincial cities such as Wollongong, and were always on emotional highs
simply by being there at a live performance’. My grandfather’s letters
paint a portrait of a couple developing their cultural life together. It is
Introduction 3
undeniably a middlebrow portrait, one where culture is not acquired
through formal education systems but self-taught and heavily reliant
on mediators, from public concerts to radio programs.
The next generation also pursued cultural development, and increas-
ingly this was achieved through education. My mother studied nursing,
then teaching, then completed a Masters in Psychology. My father,
too, was the first person in his family to go to university – in his case,
to study architecture. Their gradual accumulation of cultural and eco-
nomic status over the decades led to my own assumption of a birthright
to a lengthy liberal arts university education. My own cultural con-
sumption has inevitably been affected by this institutional framework.
As an undergraduate, I was intellectually excited about Modernism and
Postmodernism, and learned to appreciate canonical texts from the
sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Over time, I became critical of my
own elitism and started reading more widely: Nora Roberts became a
particular favourite.
My position in this book is that of an academic, but I also embrace
the practices that I describe as belonging to the new literary mid-
dlebrow. I’m a member of three book clubs, I’ve read all of the Harry
Potter books, I’ve put a bet on the Booker Prize, I’ve attended writers
festivals and had books signed by authors whose work I love. My mid-
dlebrow practices are inflected by my academic experience, which adds
an inevitable, distancing self-consciousness to my recreational literary
activities, but I also value the sense of connection I feel with my fellow
book club members, festival attendees and Harry Potter fans. This study
has interrogated my own assumptions about literature, and springs
from both a desire to describe the patterns of my literary consumption
and a wider curiosity about literary culture, its history and its future
developments.
Chapter 1 is a field guide to the middlebrow, and presents the eight
key features by which you can recognize middlebrow practices. Such
a definition is important because the term middlebrow is still used
so imprecisely – its meaning is in flux and requires filling out. Not
all middlebrow institutions, practices or texts display all of the eight
features I identify, but the family resemblance between them is strong.
Every aspect of the literary middlebrow has most of these attributes:
the middlebrow is middle class, reverential and commercial, feminized,
mediated, recreational, emotional and earnest. My description of these
features in Chapter 1 incorporates a theoretical engagement with Pierre
Bourdieu’s model of the literary field. The discussion is illustrated with
examples from both historical and contemporary literary culture and
demonstrates the persistence of specifically middlebrow practices. The