Middlebrow Wodehouse: P.G. Wodehouse's Work in ContextWhile 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
Aspiring | |
Impudence in P G Wodehouses Novels | |
P G Wodehouse and the First World | |
Wodehouse School | |
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aesthetic argues aristocratic Armine aspirations audience Aunt authority bachelor banjolele Barsetshire become Bertie and Jeeves Bertie Wooster Bertie’s Blandings Blandings Castle Bolton broadcasts Broadway Carry On Jeeves characters clothes comic country house critics culture Deeping’s depiction dress Dulwich early emotional Empress entertainment Feminine Middlebrow genre girl Grover Guy Bolton highbrow humour impudence Inimitable Jeeves intellectual Jeeves and Bertie Jeeves and Wooster Jeeves stories Jeeves’s Jerome Kern Leavis literary literature London Lord Emsworth lowbrow magazine masculinity McCrum middle middle-class middlebrow Middlebrow Novel Mike modern modernist Mooneyham moral musical comedy musical theatre narrative narrator novelist one’s P.G. Wodehouse philosophy plays plot political popular post-war Princess Theatre Psmith public-school queer readers reading relationship resentment romance scene school stories schoolboy short stories Show Boat Sitting Pretty social song Spinoza taste Thirkell Thirkell’s upper-class wartime Wodehouse’s Wodehouse’s fiction wrote Yates Yates’s York young