Beth Driscoll, “The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014)

New Books in Sociology · Dec 3, 2014 · 41m

It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth Driscoll, from University of Melbourne, extends and critiques the work of Pierre Bourdieu to account for modern literary tastes and the literary field in which those tastes are embedded. The book attempts to explore and defend the idea of the middlebrow in literature. ‘Middlebrow’ is defined by eight characteristics, whereby it is middle class, it has reverence to elite cultures, and it is…