Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace

Series Editors: Kate Macdonald and Ann Rea

In the past, critics and writers anxious to build the canon have often focused on the 'highbrow' or high culture dismissing other writers to the derogatory category of 'middlebrow' or 'popular' literature. Some writers and texts actively resisted such prejudices or embraced popular appeal through a willingness to address a wide audience. Other texts were dismissed from the canon because they were written by women, addressed women’s concerns, or because they appeared connected with strands of the middle- and working-class inimical to high culture.

This series offers monographs and edited collections of essays that examine the extents and effects of writing that resists the uncritical embrace of the highbrow. Crossing both cultural and geographic boundaries, it brings together studies of texts, writers, readers, producers and distributors. It will highlight current debates about the politics of mainstream readerships and media, about the designation of audiences and material methods of circulation and will address contemporary critical concerns. By attending to how these texts resist the 'high' cultural imperative it is possible to learn how culture is commodified for particular classes and the role that gender and social class play in the production of those categories.

Send us a Proposal

We invite submissions from established scholars and first-time authors alike. Prospective authors should send a detailed proposal with a rationale, chapter outlines and at least two sample chapters alongside a brief author's biography and an anticipated submission date.

For detailed information on submitting a proposal, including an example of a successful submission, please click here.

Please contact either Mark Pollard, Publishing Director (mark@pickeringchatto.co.uk), Kate Macdonald (kate.macdonald@ugent.be) or Ann Rea (anr12@pitt.edu) for preliminary review.

Readership

Books published in this series are aimed at the academic, research and advanced postgraduate markets. The series will be of particular value to those working on nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglophone literary culture and history in the USA, Britain and beyond, as well as the history of publishing, reader/reception studies, women’s history and the history of masculinity.

Editorial board

Kristin Bluemel is Professor of English at Monmouth University, NJ, and is editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and author of George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (Palgrave, 2004). She edits the interdisciplinary journal, The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, and is a founding member of The Space Between Society. Her current research is on women's contributions to British children's literature of the 1930s and 1940s.

David Carter is Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Queensland. He is the author of A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career (1997) and Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies (2006). Edited books include The Making of Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing (2007), The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life (2004) and Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs (2001). He has published essays in major volumes on Australian literature including ‘Publishing, Patronage and Cultural Politics’ in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals’ in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2001) and ‘The Mystery of the Missing Middlebrow’ in Imagining Australia (2004). He is currently writing a history of the Australian middlebrow and a study of relations between the Australian and American book trades.

Stella Deen is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she specializes in twentieth-century British literature to 1945. She edited Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture 1914–45 (Ashgate, 2002). She has also published articles on middlebrow and non-modernist writers, including '"So Minute and Yet So Alive"’: Domestic Modernity in E H Young’s William', ‘"There is No Ordinary Life"’: Privacy and Domesticity in E H Young’s Celia and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart' and 'Enid Bagnold’s The Happy Foreigner: The Wider World Beyond Love'.

Christoph Ehland is a Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. He teaches middlebrow writing, in terms of the crime novel and the feminine middlebrow novel. His most recent publication concerning middlebrow writing is 'The Watchdogs of Eden: Chesterton and Buchan Look at the Present of the Future', in Ralph Pordzik (ed), Futurescapes (Rodopi, 2009).

David Finkelstein is Dean of Humanities at the University of Dundee. His research interests include media history, print culture and book history studies. His publications include The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002), and the co-authored An Introduction to Book History (2005). He is also editor of Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition (2006), which was awarded the Robert Colby Scholarly Book Prize for the publication in 2006 that most significantly advanced the understanding of the nineteenth-century periodical press. He has also co-edited Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (2000), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media (2000), The Book History Reader (2001; 2nd revised edition 2006) and the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: vol 4: Professionalism and Diversity, 1880-2000 (2007).

Faye Hammill is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research areas are Canadian literature and interwar middlebrow culture. Publications relating to middlebrow include Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (2007), Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (2010) and a contribution to Kristin Bluemel’s Intermodernism (2009). She is a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing 1900–1950 (2006) and is currently leading the Middlebrow Network, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Nick Hubble is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature at Brunel University. He specialises in socio-cultural and critical analysis and his main research interests lie in non-canonical areas including science fiction and the linked fields of intermodernism and middlebrow studies. His publications include Mass-Observation and Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2006), the editorship of special issues of New Formations (2001), Literary London (2009) and EnterText (2010). He is also one of the co-editors of the forthcoming Continuum Handbook to Science Fiction and has published articles in a range of journals including Extrapolation, Foundation, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, Modernist Cultures and World Literature Written in English.

Phyllis Lassner is Professor at Northwestern University. Her involvement with the Middlebrow includes two books on Elizabeth Bowen, British Women Writers of World War II, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire and most recently, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust. She has co-edited a collection of essays on Rumer Godden, forthcoming, 2010.

Kate Macdonald is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Ghent, Belgium. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters on book history and periodicals culture and editor of Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps (2009, Pickering & Chatto). She is also the author of John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (2009, McFarland). In her former career she was an editor in academic publishing.

Elizabeth Maslen taught at Westfield College, University of London and then Queen Mary and Westfield College (subsequently QMUL) for many years. She is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has published books on Doris Lessing and on British women writers from 1928–1968. She is currently working on a critical biography of Storm Jameson.

Ann Rea is Visiting Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Her most recent publication, ‘From “Free Love” to Married Love: Gender Politics, Marie Stopes, and Middlebrow Fiction by Women in the Early Nineteen Twenties’ is forthcoming in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stubbe (eds) Aftermaths of War: Women's Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923 (forthcoming, Brill). She is Co-President of the Space Between Society for the study of Literature and Culture from 1914–1945, a multi-disciplinary, international organization.

Victoria Stewart is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, University of Leicester. Her recent publications on middlebrow literature include Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Palgrave, 2006) and articles on topics including Dodie Smith, Gilbert Frankau and interwar detective fiction. She is also the author of Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Palgrave, 2003) and is currently writing a monograph on representations of the Second World War in contemporary British fiction for Edinburgh University Press.

To place a standing order for books in this or any other series email sales@pickeringchatto.co.uk. Please include the name of each series in which you are interested and indicate whether you have already bought earlier books in the series.

Subjects

Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace

Readership

Editorial board

Published titles

Forthcoming titles

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