The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950 What Mr. Miniver Read [Hardcover]

Who was the early twentieth-century masculine middlebrow reader? How did his reading choices respond to his environment? This book looks at British middlebrow writing and reading from the late Victorian period to the 1950s and examines the masculine reader and author, and how they challenged feminine middlebrow and literary modernism.Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Introduction: Identifying the Middlebrow, the Masculine and Mr Miniver; K.Macdonald Reading Class, Examining Men: Anthologies, Education, and Literary Cultures; S.McPherson The Evolution of the Masculine Middlebrow: Gissing, Bennett, Priestley; C.E.Hill 'Watching the Papers daily in Fear and Trembling': the Boer War and the Invention of Masculine Middlebrow Literary Culture; J.Wild Professionalism and the Cultural Politics of Work in the Sherlock Holmes stories; C.Clarke From Holmes to the Drones: Fantasies of Men without Women in the Masculine Middlebrow;? N.Humble Healing Landscapes and evolving Nationalism in interwar Canadian Middlebrow Fiction of the First World War; A.Tector 'Everybody's Essayist': on Middles and Middlebrows; C.Pollentier Modernity and the Gendering of Middlebrow Book Culture in Australia; D.Carter 'Mind's Middle Distances': Men of Letters in interwar New Zealand; C.Hilliard The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell; A.Vaninskaya 'The Collaborator, the Tyrant, and the Resistance': The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and Masculine Middlebrow England in the Second World War; A.Rea Bibliography Index

Both forceful and elegant, the essays in this collection evince the myriad ways in which middlebrow readers found radical, challenging ideas at every turn. And, perhaps more importantly, they sketch out how popular reading tastes played a central role in establishing new male identities for an expanding middle class in a world reshaped by industrialization, world wars, universal education and female suffrage. In allowing us a glimpse of this process, The MasclC"