'This collection of essays looks at British middlebrow writing and reading from the late Victorian period to the 1950s, examining a specifically masculine trend in a largely unexplored stream of literary and publishing culture. It reconsiders what was being reacted against by the feminine writer and the woman reader of middlebrow writing, as well as, in a wider field, the masculine middlebrow response to literary modernism. The essays examine who the masculine reader at this period may have been, and how his reading choices responded to his social and cultural environment. Our attention is drawn to the reader and his needs, rather than to the producers of what he read. Contributors include Nicola Humble, author of The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, and Christopher Hilliard, an authority on the democratization of writing in interwar Britain.' (Publisher's blurb)
