Abstract
The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of a new type of novel that straddled the divide between popular entertainment and legitimate culture by combining ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary forms and catering en masse for the tastes of an expanding middleclass reading public. In this article we want to explore the ways in which the novels La Madone des sleepings (1925) by the bestselling French novelist Maurice Dekobra and Venetiaansch avontuur [Venetian adventure] (1931) by the Dutch author Johan Fabricius fit into this broad category of the middlebrow novel and how their use of adventure as a structural devise might complicate the common view of the middlebrow novel as a form of domestic realism.
Highlights
In this article we want to explore the ways in which the novels La Madone des sleepings (1925) by the bestselling French novelist Maurice Dekobra and Venetiaansch avontuur [Venetian adventure] (1931) by the Dutch author Johan Fabricius fit into this broad category of the middlebrow novel and how their use of adventure as a structural devise might complicate the common view of the middlebrow novel as a form of domestic realism
Maurice Dekobra is often introduced as the author who invented a new type of novel, viz. the so-called cosmopolitan novel
There might certainly be some truth in these observations, it remains to be seen to what extent the combination of cosmopolitanism and realism of novels such as La Madone des sleepings really epitomizes something new
Summary
Dekobra made the elite cosmopolitism of the turn of the century, epitomized for instance by luxurious tourism, accessible for a much broader audience, ingeniously mixing elitist social assumptions and highbrow cultural references with popular generic models such as the novel of adventures.
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