Middlebrow Matters : Women's Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle �Epoque.
- 1 online resource (256 pages)
- Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Ser. ; v.57 .
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Reclaiming the Middlebrow -- 2. The Birth of French Middlebrow -- 3. Colette: The Middlebrow Modernist -- 4. Interwar France: The Case of the Missing Middlebrow -- 5. The 'little world' of Fran�coise Sagan -- 6. Literary Prizes, Women and the Middlebrow -- 7. Realism, Romance and Self-reflexivity: Twenty-first-century Middlebrow -- Conclusion: Marie NDiaye's femme puissante - a Double Reading -- Bibliography -- Index.
This is the first book to study the middlebrow novel in France. It asks what middlebrow means, and applies the term positively to explore the 'poetics' of the types of novel that have attracted 'ordinary' fiction readers - in their majority female - since the end of the 19th century.