Middlebrow Wodehouse: P.G. Wodehouse's Work in Context

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Professor Ann Rea
Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., Jan 28, 2016 - Literary Criticism - 302 pages

While he is best known for his Jeeves and Bertie Wooster stories, P.G. Wodehouse was a prolific writer who penned many other novels, stories, and musical comedy libretti, the latter of which played an enormous role in the development of American musical theater. This collection re-examines Wodehouse in the context of recent scholarship on the middlebrow, attending to his self-conscious relationship to the literary marketplace and his role in moving musical comedy away from vaudeville’s lowbrow associations towards the sophistication of the Wodehouse style. The focus on the middlebrow creates a critical context for serious critical consideration of Wodehouse’s linguistic playfulness and his depictions of social class within England. The contributors explore Wodehouse’s fiction and libretti in reference to philosophy, depictions of masculinity, World War I Britain, the periodical market, ideas of Englishness, and cultural phenomena such as men’s fashion, food culture, and popular songwriting. Taken together, the essays draw attention to the arbitrary divide between high- and middlebrow culture and make a case for Wodehouse as a writer whose games with language are in keeping with modernist experimentation with artistic expression.

 

Contents

Notes on Contributors
Middlebrow Aesthetic and Literary
Aspiring
Impudence in P G Wodehouses Novels 1909
P G Wodehouse and the First World
Wodehouse School
Blandings Barsetshire and Britain
Wooster the Musician
Philosophy with a Smile
UpperClass Masculinity in Crisis
The Queer Domesticity of Bertie and Jeeves
Problematic Menswear in P G Wodehouse and Dornford
Food and Hospitality in Wartime Wodehouse
Theatre Genre
Index

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About the author (2016)

Ann Rea is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, USA.

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