The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment"The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping seeks to demonstrate that the way cultural hierarchies are established shapes the nature of the products generated. Although commentators on mass culture have stressed the homogenous identity of popular texts, the mechanical nature of their production and the passivity of their consumers, Deeping's novels imply that readers are aware of and resistant to such characterizations. Q. D. Leavis identified this resistance, but she and other self-appointed members of the cultural elite failed to recognize that the "game" of drawing cultural distinctions blunted the exercise of the very quality on which the self-appointed. umpires based their claim to cultural superiority-moral intelligence and discrimination."--BOOK JACKET. |
Contents
31 | |
Simple Simon The Strategic Functions of Autobiography | 58 |
A Bitter Silence The Compromised Class Position of Popular Authorship | 93 |
Old Wine and New The Reception of Sorrell and Son | 132 |
Blind Mans Year The Deforming Constructions of Hierarchy | 164 |
Notes | 187 |
209 | |
228 | |
Other editions - View all
The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment Mary Grover No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
admiration aspiring assert autonomy best seller best-selling Blind Man's Bourdieu bourgeois British brow Cassell chapter class position constructed contemporary critics Crossick cultural status D. H. Lawrence debate Deeping's fiction Deeping's novels demonstrate described despite Dornford Yates economic Edgar Wallace England English fantasies father fear female garden gender Gilbert Frankau hero hero's heroine highbrow Ibid Igraine individual ing's intellectual kind Knopf Leavis's literary literature London lower middle classes Martin Amis Mary Grover Maude middlebrow modern moral nature novelist November Old Pybus Old Wine Oxford petite bourgeoisie Pierre Bourdieu popular author popular fiction published Q. D. Leavis readers readership Reading Public reflected Review rhetoric romance Roper's Row Rust of Rome Scarsdale Scarsdale's seems sense sexual Smith social Sorrell Sorrell and Son Sorrell's Southend story success suggests superior taste texts tion tone Uther and Igraine Valour Warwick Deeping wife woman Woolf Wotschke writer