Media: Challenging Modernism — the ‘Middlebrow’ and Memodrama

Abstract

Modernists, such as Wyndham Lewis or Ezra Pound, announced with iconoclast pathos that the past would disappear in a vortex and give way to the new, as expressed in such experimental movements as vorticism, futurism, imagism and other forms of highbrow literature.1 The same period saw the development of modern mass culture.2 Education had improved literacy levels, and technological progress in printing made possible the replacement of the expensive three-decker novel common in the nineteenth century with cheaper one-volume editions. This furthered the development of a literary mass market in which relations between authors and publishers were increasingly influenced by agents. New magazines appeared and fuelled the demand for entertaining journalism, travel accounts and, significantly, short stories. A number of new publishers entered the fray, such as Mills & Boon, founded in 1908, whose name has become synonymous with popular romance. ‘Between the fall of the threedecker and the outbreak of the First World War were twenty years in which fiction was perhaps the most important sector of the leisure industry.’3 Despite the relative success of popular historiography and other forms of non-fictional writing, fiction was clearly the driving force in this expansion of the literary market, and a number of new genres appeared — many of course with roots in the nineteenth century — among them, as noted in the Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction, ‘Boer War fiction’, ‘crime fiction’, ‘exoticism’, ‘fantasy fiction’, ‘feminist fiction’, ‘historical romance’, ‘horror stories’, ‘invasion scare stories’, ‘marriage problem fiction’, ‘Ruritanian Romance’, ‘science fiction’, ‘spy fiction’ and ‘suburban fiction’.4