Introduction: The Middlebrow – Within or Without Modernism

Abstract

In Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) Q. D. Leavis argues that the success of the Book Society in the United Kingdom is evidence that ‘a middlebrow standard of values has been set up’ and that the second-rate ‘middlebrow taste has thus been organized’. From Leavis’s perspective, the disputes and frustrations over this ‘battle of the brows’ had become so heated that she had to issue a veritable call to arms, crying that ‘if there is to be any hope, it must lie in conscious and directed effort. All that can be done, it must be realised, must take the form of resistance by an armed and conscious minority’. 1 This bombastic and hyperbolic proclamation in a highbrow’s lengthy study of cultural capital and the literary field indicates how well elite writers, artists, critics and publishers were both organised and empowered at this time. While a single highbrow cannot represent that supposedly illustrious sphere, the proliferation of similarly reductive portraits of the middlebrow suggests highbrow privilege and influence during the ‘battle of the brows’, as well as the need for nuanced yet bold middlebrow self-fashionings. 2 The rivalries among high, middle and lowbrows regarding cultural capital during the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and America were indeed the cause of great anxiety and confusion over taste, aesthetic production, audience, race, class and gender, and are still open to much energetic debate in academia and the broader public sphere today. But the borderlands between high and middlebrow cultures and consumption practices were not as easily discernible as the reigning interwar critics, media or publishers often successfully suggested to the public.