NB: the conference has been extended to the Saturday

The increase in modernist and avant-garde cultural manifestations in the early years of the twentieth century displaced realist and traditional literary works from, in Bourdieu's sense, "legitimate" culture. The former came to represent "highbrow", with a concomitant exclusion of all that highbrow was not. Even influential and critically acclaimed writers, such as H. G. Wells, were derided for maintaining their realist style as well as for catering to popular taste. Retrospectively, the conception of modernism has been expanded in order to be able to accommodate less obviously avant-garde works, but this expansion may not be continued indefinitely. Lines of demarcation between high, low, mass, and middle, in their varying media and forms, need to be identified to enable a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of literary and other cultural forms in this period, and the contemporary reception of the texts and ideas expressed therein.

This conference seeks to examine the emergence of modernism outside elitist, avant-garde notions, particularly focussing on middlebrow literature in its relation to these socio-cultural developments. We assume that, even though middlebrow fiction usually adheres to conspicuously affirmative structures of plot development in order to meet genre expectations and publishers' requirements, this narrative framework is often in a disintegrative state, in form and subject. Such narratives raise disturbing issues concerning the crumbling Empire, collapsing class structures and the deterioration of the Victorian family ideal. For women, in particular, the middlebrow novel provided a space for the negotiation of and experimentation with alternative social and gender roles. In this sense, middlebrow writing can be regarded as a domestication of modernist themes also prevalent at the time; allowing unsettling issues to be raised while maintaining at least a superficial impression of (narrative) stability and security. Based on the assumption that such works reached a far wider audience than those of the avant-garde, by exploring such issues of stability and disintegration this conference aims to advance research on the production, dissemination and reception of middlebrow and popular fiction between 1890-1930.

The conference is organised by Professor Christoph Ehland (University of Paderborn) and Dr Kate Macdonald (University of Ghent): kate.macdonald@ugent.be.

CLICK HERE FOR A PDF VERSION OF THE PROGRAMME.

CLICK HERE FOR A POSTER.

Registration fees:
£65 standard
£45 Speakers/Students/IES members/Unwaged

CLICK HERE FOR A REGISTRATION FORM IN WORD.DOC
CLICK HERE FOR A REGISTRATION FORM IN PDF

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