Transitions in middlebrow writing, 1880-1930

Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880 - 1930 examines the connections evident between the simultaneous emergence of British modernism and middlebrow literary culture from 1880 to the 1930s. The essays describe the connections, interstices and transitions from the highbrow and lowbrow into the middlebrow, and illustrate the mutual influences of modernist and middlebrow authors, critics, publishers and magazines. This period saw major changes in the literary and artistic tastes of the cultural elites, the publishing houses, the magazines and the reading public, and so the authors explore the influence of modernism on middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments in the marketplace. The essays discuss the authors J M Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, F M Crawford, Gustave Flaubert, John Galsworthy, A S M Hutchinson, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Wallace, and H G Wells; the critics Henry-D. Davray, Herman Robbers and Charles Marriott; and the magazines To-Day and the Mercure de France.