Beyond Clichés and Satire: Expatriation and Modernism in a Middlebrow Novel, The French They are a Funny Race,

Abstract

This article focuses on the discussion of expatriation and on the representations of modernism in a middlebrow novel, The French They are a Funny Race, by Lyon Mearson (1931), arguing that those two aspects are linked by a common critical perspective on distinction, understood as the feeling of superiority the expatriates and the modernists develop towards ordinary people. Using primary sources from the same time period, it first inscribes The French within those two literary and critical traditions, the expatriation novel on the one hand, and the discussion of modernism in middlebrow productions on the other hand. It then proceeds to show that the novel’s standpoint on expatriation and modernism is quite subtle, and noticeably less conservative and more open-minded than other expatriation novels and middlebrow magazines.