The New Literary Middlebrow

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Beth Driscoll

   Pages 1-4

3. Recognizing the Literary Middlebrow

   • Beth Driscoll

   Pages 5-44

4. Book Clubs, Oprah, Women and the Middlebrow

   • Beth Driscoll

   Pages 45-82

5. Harry Potter and the Middlebrow Pedagogies of Teachers and Reviewers

   • Beth Driscoll

   Pages 83-118

6. The Man Booker Prize: Money, Glory and Media Spectacle

   • Beth Driscoll

   Pages 119-151

7. The Middlebrow Pleasures of Literary Festivals

   • Beth Driscoll

   Pages 152-193

8. Conclusion: the Future of Reading

   • Beth Driscoll

   Pages 194-201

9. Back Matter

   Pages 202-228

   PDF

The middlebrow is a dominant cultural force in the twenty-first century. This book defines the new literary middlebrow through eight key features: middle class, feminized, reverential, commercial, emotional, recreational, earnest and mediated. Case studies include Oprah's Book Club, the Man Booker Prize and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

• bibliography
• Case Studies
• festival
• future
• knowledge
• media
• women

“Driscoll’s volume is an eminently readable and illuminating study of the middlebrow as it operates within our current culture. … All in all, I would recommend Driscoll’s volume to scholars studying bestsellers, publishing, reading practices, and the circulation of texts within the culture, not only for its methodology but for its illumination of contemporary literary engagement.” (Angela Toscano, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Vol. 9, 2020)

“The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century, is an excellent introduction to the mechanisms of literary appreciation and distribution in contemporary culture. … Driscoll’s account of the ‘new literary middlebrow’ makes this an essential book for literary critics and cultural scholars who want to understand contemporary reading culture.” (Jaime Harker, Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 22 (1), 2016)

"...Driscoll does a thorough and thoughtful job of working out the cultural and institutional dimensions of her analysis. In particular, she makes a strong case for there being a distinctively feminised mode of reading, which values affective identification with characters, which looks for a reflection of its own experiences in their lives, and which is 'ethical' in the sense of exercising moral judgement on a world that is taken to be close to the real world: this regime looks for 'stories of personal growth and moral redemption,' and sees reading 'as part of a larger project of moral improvement' (40)." John Frow, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

"Driscoll is a lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, and while her book draws on theory and is written mainly for academic readers, it's highly accessible, especially for the people she's writing about, we literary middlebrows." Jane Sullivan, The Sydney Morning Herald

• University of Melbourne, Australia

  Beth Driscoll

Beth Driscoll is Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

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