The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment

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Associated University Presse, 2009 - Literary Criticism - 232 pages
"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

The Shame of the Middlebrow Deepings Cultural Context
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
Bibliography
209
Index
228
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