5 - Modernism and the Middlebrow

Summary

This chapter focuses on the institutions of middlebrow culture in America, exploring their role in disseminating and also critiquing modernism. The smart magazines, reprint series, and book clubs of the interwar and midcentury period worked to create new audiences for modernist writing and to make difficult texts more accessible. Yet the discourse of the middlebrow – with its emphasis on affective response and its skepticism about experiment – formed a counterpractice to modernist and New Critical formalism. Middlebrow institutions were oriented toward self-improvement and the education of taste, and debates raged about whether their effect was to democratize culture or to standardize it. The chapter considers the tastemakers of the era, ranging from Vanity Fair and The Crisis to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. It also discusses the novelists – such as Anita Loos and Sinclair Lewis - who satirized the culture of upward mobility that emerged in the US following World War I.