America the Middlebrow
Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars
By Jaime Harker
University of Massachusetts Press
Between the two world wars, American publishing entered a "golden age" characterized by an explosion of new publishers, authors, audiences, distribution strategies, and marketing techniques. The period was distinguished by a diverse literary culture, ranging from modern cultural rebels to working-class laborers, political radicals, and progressive housewives. In America the Middlebrow, Jaime Harker focuses on one neglected mode of authorship in the interwar period—women's middlebrow authorship and its intersection with progressive politics.
With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.
Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.
With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.
Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.
Part cultural/intellectual history and part literary history and criticism, this book is interesting and useful. . . . The writing is clear and accessible, and the book will be of use not only to literary scholars, but also to cultural historians of the early twentieth century.'—Trysh Travis, University of Florida
'America the Middlebrow is, first, a readable and thought-provoking reclamation of four important mid-century women writers, solidly in the feminist literary tradition that Elaine Showalter defined early on as gynocriticism. It is also a serious scholarly challenge to the hegemony of traditional modernist aesthetics, a vital reclamation of the novel's political and persuasive power and of its central place in American culture, and a careful argument for more respectful attention to general readers. This captivating book will move the conversation about women readers and writers forward significantly with its exploration of the neglected historical space between nineteenth-century and contemporary book club women.'—Cecilia Konchar Farr, author of Reading Oprah:
How Oprah's Book Club Changed the Way America Reads
Jaime Harker is assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
