Death to Gradgrind

There has always been a “reading crisis,” at least for the last two hundred years. Up to the end of the nineteenth century critics fretted over the spread of mass literacy, which (they anticipated) would degrade the quality of literature. And then, at various points over the twentieth century, critics warned that the Book-of-the-Month Club, or middlebrow literature, or paperbacks, or the Great Books of the Western World, or Oprah Winfrey would mean the end of serious reading. As documented here, none of these irrational fears had any basis in reality. But even if others frequently cried wolf in the past, there are real and present threats to reading, and often (ironically) they come from the very quarters that warn that reading is in a crisis that must be addressed. Perhaps the most deeply troubling development on the reading instruction front is Common Core, a set of educational standards that promises “career and college readiness.” It has been adopted by most of the fifty states in the US, though several are having second thoughts and pulling back. The Gates Foundation has heavily promoted Common Core, donating a total of $150 million to teachers’ unions, universities, foundations, state departments of education, and think tanks that support the program. What Bill Gates prefers to call “ philanthropy” was in this case more like an investment, given that the Common Core would require much greater use of computers in classrooms. Likewise, publishing giant Pearson stood ready to corral a huge and largely captive market for textbooks oriented to Common Core. (Historians of textbooks know that, because they are usually sold to a government monopsony, opportunities for corruption are enormous.) Championed as well by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and many state governors, Common Core thus involves the takeover of school reading instruction not by capitalism, but by crony capitalism, cutting out both teachers and parents in shaping educational policy. Pearson was awarded contracts that effectively ensured that the company would be the only qualified bidder. In a 28 February 2014 meeting, Pearson CEO John Fallon and CFO Robin Freestone discussed the company’s long-term profitability with eight market analysts.

Ambivalent Mobilities in the Pacific

Australian travel writing of the interwar period expanded with the growth of tourism in the Pacific Islands and the development of publishing and literacy at home. This article focuses on how the Australian middlebrow imagination was shaped by the diverse travel accounts of Australian tourists, adventurers, executives, scientists, officials, and missionaries writing at this time. Many of their texts borrowed and blended multiple discourses, simultaneously promoting the islands as educational and exotic, and appealing to an Australian middlebrow readership. In this article I argue that not only was travel writing middlebrow in its content and style, but the islands themselves were a particularly middlebrow setting. This is evident in representations of the islander “savage” in the region of Melanesia, a prevalent theme in Australian travelogues. I argue that this middlebrow literature was characterized by ambivalent and often contradictory ideas about the civilized “self” and the savage “other.”

Middlebrow Modernity: Class, Cinema-going and Selfhood

The chapter explores the presence of cinema in middlebrow literary fictions, looking at how cinemagoing features in the depiction of middle-class life in feminine middlebrow literature specifically in novels by Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Bowen, Stella Gibbons and others. It argues that such writings crafted references to cinema fictions and cinema cultures as a tool for constructing a gendered cultural commentary on middle-class life in the interwar period. They used cinema to influence, invoke or challenge readers’ attitudes to questions of British women’s middle-class identities, duties and social place. Middlebrow writers used the act of going to the pictures as a fictional arena for interrogating the real-world impact of cinematic leisure cultures. They did so in a period during which the formation of public and private class-based identities was enacted in part through leisure and consumer activities. Watching the screen, watching others around you and being conscious of one’s self being watched in that space emerges as a recurrent theme in these texts. In this way, writing about cinema-going opened a window on to the complexities and pressures inherent within gendered and class identities by enabling filmic representations to blend and interact with the fictionalisation of being inside the cinema space.

POPULAR HISTORY, POST-WAR LIBERALISM, AND THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IN RICHARD HOFSTADTER'S THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION (1948)

ABSTRACTThis article examines the status of Richard Hofstadter's classic work The American political tradition (1948) as a ‘popular history’. It uses documents drawn from Hofstadter's personal papers, those of his publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., as well as several of his contemporaries, to pursue a detailed reconstruction of the manner in which the book was written, edited, and reviewed, and to demonstrate how it circulated within, and was defined by, the literary culture of the 1940s and 1950s. The article explores Hofstadter's early career conception of himself as a scholar writing for audiences outside of the academy, reframes the significance of so-called ‘middlebrow’ literature, and, in doing so, offers a fresh appraisal of the links between popular historical writing, liberal politics, and the role of public intellectuals in the post-war United States.

Literaire levenslessen

Literary life lessons. The first ‘Scharten novel’ as a model of new middlebrow literaturePresenting the case of one of the first bestselling novels by C. and M. Scharten-Antink, this article analyzes how at the beginning of the twentieth century the middlebrow novel was introduced in the Netherlands, which gave rise to a rapidly growing tradition of literary midcult. This new kind of novel, it is argued, is not merely a new genre, yet is a product of new cultural practices in which authors and publishers cooperated. In order to produce the middlebrow novel for a vast and new reading public, they combined existing, longstanding models with new ones. The concept of ‘model’ is used here to analyze the new middlebrow practice from three interrelated perspectives. First, I conceive of ‘model’ as the repertoire, the sets of rules available at a given time, on which authors and publishers could base their choices and actions. Second, I argue that, in literary criticism, the new middlebrow novel soon rose to the status of a model itself. Third, I demonstrate that the major goal of the middlebrow novel was, by way of ‘fictional modelization’, to provide the reader with life-lessons, models to live with.

Page Composing and Lettering Games: Experimentation in Italy in the 1930s

The objective of this article is to analyze how or in what ways the most advanced visual experiments centred on “the book” as an object in the period between 1900 and 1930 in Italy, in particular in relation to the development of middlebrow literature. The article’s hypothesis is that the revolution brought about by Futurism soon touched on literature intended for a middlebrow reading public, attracted and interested by the paratextual presentation of the book and its physical aspects. This article focuses in particular on changes in page layout and on lettering games in paratextuality, to give a precise idea of how strong the thrust of Futurism was and how book design affected the visual culture of the beginning of the twentieth century in Italy.