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  3. Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel
  • This book is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
Publisher:
Pickering & Chatto
Online publication date:
December 2014
Online ISBN:
9781848933392
Subjects:
Literature, Literary Texts
Information

Book description

Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941) and Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75) wrote witty and entertaining novels about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Widely read and enjoyed, their work was often dismissed as middlebrow. Brown argues that their skilful use of comedy and irony worked as devices to provide the receptive reader with a subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life. She traces the critical reception of their novels from the publication of von Arnim's Christopher and Columbus (1919) to Taylor's In a Summer Season (1961). In doing so, she demonstrates that hostility to the 'feminine middlebrow', often supposed to be at its height between the wars, in fact intensified after World War II.

Shortlisted for the ESSE Book Awards, 2014 – Literatures in the English Language (Junior Scholars)

Reviews

"'This is an impressive scholarly work. Erica Brown’s excellent new study spiritedly divests middlebrow writing of its pejorative associations and offers a lively and insightful analysis of Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Von Arnim as ironists and humorists whose style, comedic technique and sophistication situate them squarely within traditions of women’s writing associated with Jane Austen.'"

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