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The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping - Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (Hardcover)
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The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping - Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (Hardcover)
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This book examines how the hierarchical structures of taste implied
by the term middlebrow were negotiated by the best-selling
novelist, Warwick Deeping (1877 - 1950). Deeping is the focus for
three reasons: he was immensely popular, prolific, and his
popularity was perceived by such critics as Q. D. Leavis as a
threat to the "sensitive minority". His sixty-eight novels from
1903 to 1950 give the cultural historian the unusual opportunity of
tracing the develpment of an author's attempts to protect both
himself and his readers from a process of cultural devaluation.
After 1925, the best-selling Sorrell and Son and its successors
established "a" Deeping as a product about which both admirers and
detractors had certain expectations. His response to these provides
an exemplary site within which to examine how cultural distinctions
were being negotiated and contested in Britain between the two
World Wars. The introduction traces the genealogy of Dr. Grover's
theoretical approach. The theories of the Frankfurt school and of
Pierre Bourdieu do not account adequately for the generation of
texts in response to perceived cultural hierarchies. Deeping's
texts are increasingly explicit in the ways they dramatize and
address their own questionable cultural status. Grover uses this
self-consciousness to test the limits of the usefulness of
available theories of cultural production. Chapter 1 historicizes
the emergenceof the term middlebrow, contrasting its use on either
side of the Atlantic to demonstrate class and cultural context.
Chapter 2 shows how Deeping represented his own class positioning
as bestselling author. Chapter 3 examines a group of novels,
preceding Sorrell and Son and before the term middlebrow had
currency, in which the writer is depicted as feminized and
declassified. Chapter 4 concerns the reception of Sorrell and Son
and Deeping's fictionalization of its reception. The final chapter
deals with the animosity to which Sorrell's success exposed the
culturally beleaguered Deeping
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