In their published work, Ilf and Petrov equated low culture – trashy movies, wrestling, burlesque – with American culture. At the other end of the spectrum, they endeavored to show that American high culture consisted entirely of high-priced European imports that wealthy patrons appreciated only as luxury commodities, not art. Nothing, Ilf and Petrov emphasized, could be further from the situation in the Soviet Union, where the state-supported opera houses and concert halls made high culture available to all. Recovering the encounters with middlebrow culture that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue largely ignored, Chapter 12 argues that Soviet and American cultural producers shared some of the same aims and challenges – even as they operated under different constraints.

This chapter focuses not on a particular literary technology, but on the shifts in the literary field that occurred in response to the threat of obsolescence at the hands of competing media such as film and television. Adapting marketing techniques from those media, and capitalizing on new formats such as the paperback, the literary field broadened to expand its appeal to an ever-widening “middlebrow” reading public. By the 1930s, Jaillant argues, these developments in format and marketing had effectively broken down any rigid dividing line between “literary” and “nonliterary” reading publics, so that advertisements for a bestseller such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses could appear side by side.

Chapter 1 discusses a constellation of texts that use satire to challenge the system of taste: Richard Bruce Nugent’s novel Gentleman Jigger; Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss”; and Virginia Woolf’s essays “On Being Ill,” “Middlebrow,” and A Room of One’s Own. Though they precede Bourdieu’s Distinction by decades, these texts demonstrate their authors’ awareness of the ways aesthetic and gustatory taste are both acculturated and intertwined, and they use the slippage between these two forms of taste to denaturalize both. The systems of gustatory and aesthetic taste are challenged by the events narrated within each of these texts, and they challenge, too, the system of genres that defines satire as a mode that works against its objects. In these texts, satire is not just a way of maneuvering within or distancing oneself from a social system but a perversely reparative mode that reveals the pleasure that can inhere in resisting, failing, or working against one: the pleasure of liking “bad” foods, the pleasure of feeling too much, the pleasure of satire that embraces the sensation of being wrong.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

This chapter explores Britten’s investment in composing for young people – the most obvious outworking of his well-known belief that the composer had a ‘duty to society’. It positions this part of his oeuvre within the context of a number of interconnected contemporary critical debates: about national education reform; about the supposed impact of sound reproduction technologies on the public’s listening habits; about the arts’ imagined capacity to nurture ‘responsible citizens’; and about the contested consequences of industrialisation for local culture and community. It then examines two different ways in which Britten responded to cultural critics’ concerns about the socially alienating conditions of modern life: whereas Noye’s Fludde sought to foster community through promoting amateur performance, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra encouraged a different kind of cultural participation premised on ‘active’ listening. More broadly, these compositions reveal how arts education became a vehicle for debating, making sense of, and regulating the social changes that took place in mid-twentieth-century Britain.

This chapter is an examination of Britten’s engagement with progressive musical and aesthetic thought. As a successful and popular composer, Britten is rarely identified as an ‘avant-garde’ artist, yet his career took note of progressive developments from 1930s neoclassicism to 1970s minimalism. For mid-century critics, Britten was a cosmpolitan figure; more recently, his commitment to tonality argues a ‘reactive modernism’, in dialogue with tradition. Britten’s relations to avant-garde thought involve successive historical contexts. In the 1930s, he sought to study with Berg, wrote experimental film soundtracks, and explored neoclassical parody, without abandoning key tonality. In the 1940s, Britten’s music developed greater metric complexity. Britten’s 1950s catalogue increasingly explores a personal twelve-tone thematic idiom, along with non-European percussion sonorities inspired by renewed encounters with Balinese gamelan. Criticising avant-garde ‘complication’ in the 1960s, Britten tempered public scepticism with personal support for British avant-gardists.

CH 5: The novels of O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) have been overlooked by scholars because of their apparent artlessness and simplicity. By contrast, those of her contemporary Catherine Carswell are celebrated as examples of Scottish literary modernism. Yet Douglas’s and Carswell’s novels are not in fact as different as their disparate reception might lead us to expect. They challenge Free Church ambivalence toward the indulgence of aesthetic pleasure by representing everyday beauty as a source of happiness and of moral and intellectual amelioration. When Douglas’s characters learn to appreciate and create instances of everyday beauty, they become reconciled to the ordinariness of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society, which they realize is not so ordinary after all. In Carswell’s novels, the appreciation of everyday beauty becomes the modernist epiphany, a moment in which the everyday is transformed and the confines of middle-class, evangelical Scottish society are left behind. Reading Carswell’s novels together with Douglas’s suggests that it is perhaps more useful to conceive of the middlebrow and modernism, or popular literature and high art, as a continuum than as an opposition.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, as even a glance at recent news articles suggests, is a text which we perennially feel the need to bring to bear upon our own circumstances. Rather than exploring the ways in which our circumstances align with those of Orwell’s novel, this chapter instead considers the complicity of stage, screen, and radio adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four in promoting a sense of its perpetual pertinence to the world today. Moving from a radio adaptation starring David Niven broadcast months after the novel’s publication to a ballet produced sixty years later, this chapter charts the changing contexts in which eleven adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been staged, arguing that various readings (and misreadings) are encouraged, both subtly and overtly, by adaptations with a commercial stake in securing the primacy and continued relevance of Orwell’s work. Following this line of thought, the chapter questions the elements of Orwell’s work which have secured its popularity, considering the changes and replications of adaptation as, respectively, mitigation for the ephemerality of Orwell’s satire and an exposure of his own ambivalent relationship to the qualities of popular fiction which he derides as ‘prolefeed’.

Recent critical developments in the field of intermodernism have opened new spaces for enquiry in mid-twentieth-century British and American writing, elevating the impact and status of several non-canonical texts typically considered as ‘middlebrow’. Intermodernism re-evaluates the political, even radical, potential of such material in the social environment of its time. This chapter explores the extent to which it offers a viable model for reconstructing the literary landscape of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, as a means of recuperating ‘minor’ novelists of the period, such as Dorothy Macardle, but also of reinterpreting the apparent creative hiatus in the 1940s and 50s, and recognising, in the place of modernist ‘aftermath’, a valuable literary circuitry founded largely on the strength of the ‘middlebrow’ novel. In rereading the period between 1940 and 1960 in particular, this chapter will discuss the definition of the nation in terms of its rural identity and explore the extent to which a supposedly conservative revivalist pastoral, in the work of writers including Walter Macken and Mary Lavin, in fact disguises the potential of a radical or resistant intermodernism.