University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Tuesday 14th - Wednesday 15th July 2009
Plenary Speakers
'Making the Middlebrow: Emerging Literacies and the Material Culture of Print Culture', Professor Ann Ardis, University of Delaware
and
'Testing the Limits of the Middlebrow: the Holocaust for the Masses', Professor Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University
The study of middlebrow culture matters because it illuminates a set of tastes, institutions and social practices associated primarily with the aspirational middle class in the early to mid-twentieth century, and because it helps us understand the relationship between elite, popular and 'intermediate' cultural production. It matters especially now because the emergence of middlebrow cultural products in the decades following the First World War was, primarily, a result of technical innovations in printing, distribution, recording, and broadcasting. This relates directly to trends in our own time, since the internet has not only resulted in a vast renaissance of textual production, but has also generated new internationalised audiences and interpretive communities which echo the middlebrow cultural formations of the early twentieth century. Examples include electronic book clubs, new bohemian web magazines, and diaries and blogs which recall the Mass Observation project.
Selected Presentations
- The lingerie dress and Edwardian innocence in The Go-Between (1970) Sarah Edwards, University of Strathclyde, UK
- Sleeping with the Enemy?: Colonial Sex in Two Middlebrow Novels of the 1920s Meredith Goldsmith, Ursinus College, US
- 'Testing the Limits of the Middlebrow: the Holocaust for the Masses' Professor Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University
- A middlebrow celebrity opinion piece in Pearson's Magazine, 1906 Kate Macdonald, University of Ghent, Belgium
- Reassessing Middlebrow Drama during the Second World War [1.17MB] Rebecca D'Monte, University of the West of England, UK
- "What Every Woman Wants to Know"; Women in the Interwar Suburban Garden [2.88MB] Sarah Rawlins, University of Sheffield, UK
- Self-Portrait of the Middlebrow as Artist: Oliver Sandys on/in Caradoc Evans (1945) Chris Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Special Session: Researching the Middlebrow