The Greek Middlebrow Magazine Μπουκέτο (1924‒46) and its Supplements

This article introduces one of the first popular literary miscellanies published in Greece after the First World War, Μπουκέτο [Bouquet] (1924‒46). The first of its kind in the country, it led the way to a new type of periodical with subject matter ranging from serialized novels to short jokes, along with a modern layout featuring fine and plentiful illustrations. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field, the article starts by showing that the magazine was a manifestation of middlebrow culture, combining commercial values with legitimate cultural aspirations and an eagerness to educate the masses. After situating the magazine in the cultural field of Greek periodical publishing and specifying its audience, the article focuses on its supplements, which followed the magazine’s publishing success. These were spin-off publications associated with the magazine, such as Βιβλιοθήκη του Μπουκέτου [Bouquet’s Library] (1924‒36), a series of translated classic novels, the annual Ημερολόγιον του Μπουκέτου [Bouquet’s Calendar] (1926‒33), and pamphlets or pull-outs sewn into the central pages of the magazine. The analysis draws attention to the characteristics, as well as the threads connecting them to the parent publication. The article traces the reasons that triggered the magazine’s subsidiary products and, by extension, the purposes they fulfilled, as well as the way they were used by the magazine throughout its lifespan in an attempt to create a name for itself and engage its readership.

Modernist Music for Children

On several occasions in the midcentury United States, the music of Anton Webern was reimagined as music for children. In 1936 conductor and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published the score of Webern’s op. 10/4 on the children’s page of the Christian Science Monitor. In 1958 Webern’s op. 6/3 was featured in a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, the first conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Eight years later, Webern’s Kinderstück (Children’s Piece) received its posthumous premiere at Lincoln Center, performed by a nine-year-old pianist. In each case children served as a marker of accessibility, meant to render Webern’s music more palatable to adult audiences; thus was Webern’s music subsumed within the middlebrow circulation of classical music. Although recent scholarship has considered the intersections between modernist music and middlebrow culture, Webern’s music has remained absent from these discussions. Indeed, Webern’s terse, abstract, and severe compositions might at first appear ill suited to middlebrow contexts. Yet, as these three historical moments make clear, children served as a potent rhetorical force that could be used to market even this music to a broad audience of adults.

Copland’s Styles

This article examines the relationship between Aaron Copland’s activities as composer and as pedagogue in order to illuminate the fraught midcentury relationship between musical modernism and middlebrow culture. I situate his unpublished lecture notes and music appreciation books within the middlebrow context and trace their connections with the works he composed during this period. At the center of my investigation is the contentious midcentury category of “style,” which implicated both Copland’s music and his pedagogy in ways that illuminate middlebrow cultural appreciation at large. Challenging long-standing modernist depictions of the middlebrow as the straightforward commercialization of high culture, I excavate characteristic middlebrow commitments to compromise, novelty, and breadth that proved even more unsettling to midcentury hierarchies than mass culture’s supposedly shameless pandering. By emphasizing Copland’s commitment to a canon of modern “styles,” in composition as in music appreciation, I draw out underlying tensions between his “middlebrow” approach to modern music and a “higher,” purer form imagined by Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor W. Adorno. At the same time, I show how these distinctions often threatened to collapse. On a broader methodological level, I chart a middle course between “social” conceptions of the middlebrow—as a means of marketing, distributing, and teaching high art to a mass audience—and “aesthetic” discussions of it as a compositional style. By examining the reciprocity between Copland’s pedagogy and music, I ultimately suggest that the problem which middlebrow culture posed to high modernism lay not just in its ability to mediate between high and low, modernism and mass culture, but also in the challenges it posed to fantasies of aesthetic immediacy and autonomy.

Developing Middlebrow Culture in Fascist Italy: The Case of Rizzoli’s Illustrated Magazines

Angelo Rizzoli was one of Italy’s leading publishers in the interwar period and beyond, thanks to his business intuition and daring investments in the popular periodicals sector. In the 1920s and 1930s he published a galaxy of illustrated magazines aimed at the urban middle classes, that prove paradigmatic of a new form of Italian weeklies. The article posits that Rizzoli’s rotocalchi, based on entertaining content and photojournalism, weremediators par excellence in three areas. First, in publishing middlebrow fiction. Second, in translating short stories from linguistic and cultural milieus with a deliberate selection of specific literary genres, settings, and character types — a branding that emerges from investigating the weeklies Novella and Lei. Third, in the creation of a platform for interchange between literature, photography and cinema, mainly in Cinema Illustrazione Presenta. Notwithstanding the obstacles put in their way by the Fascist regime and the censorship system, Rizzoli’s illustrated magazines introduced and spread models of female conduct that did not coincide with those proposed by the Fascists, while adapting them to common Italian cultural values and exploiting them for commercial purposes. As a typical expression of middlebrow culture based on leisure, respectability, and consumption, they repurposed messages from other media and foreign contexts, facilitating the penetration of modern behaviour patterns in Italy.

Introduction: Poetry, Popularity and the Periodical Press

Using the publication of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘L. E. L.’s Last Question’ in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine as a case study, this chapter establishes the central premise of the book: periodical contexts are crucial to the study of Victorian poetry and poetics. From there, it provides an overview of recent work on periodical culture and poetry, including that by Kirstie Blair, Natalie Houston, Linda Hughes, Kathryn Ledbetter, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, as well as theories of cultural production and form, focusing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital and middlebrow culture, and Caroline Levine’s recent work on form and its affordances.

The Magazine-Programme and the Broadbrow Sophisticate: Britain's Interwar Theatre Culture

This article makes a significant contribution to modernist studies by including interwar theatre in the lively critical conversations around popular modernism, middlebrow culture, celebrity, and magazines. It examines The Magazine-Programme, a popular publication sold in London's West End between the wars. Its position at the intersection of the social, economic, and cultural registers of the theatre world reveals the transformative power of this period's theatre culture and its importance to modernism. Based on an examination of hundreds of these programs in various archives, it discusses how The Magazine-Programme created and promoted a new image of the modern theatre-goer and, by extension, a new image of modern selfhood: the Broadbrow Sophisticate.

Up from Middlebrow

The Chinese had a word for it—wanbao quanshu. It’s a bibliographic term, which literally means “complete compendia of myriad treasures,” but an alternate translation might be “middlebrow.” These were encyclopedic works that distilled and summarized sophisticated science, history, and politics in cheap, accessible, illustrated guidebooks. Their audience (as a 1933 survey of Shanghai bookstalls confirmed) was neither the educated elite nor the impoverished peasantry, but an intermediate semi-educated class of shop-clerks, apprentices, housewives, workers, and prostitutes. Very few readers had thoroughly mastered the Chinese vocabulary of 50,000 characters, but many more, without much difficulty, had learned 2,000 basic terms, enough to read popular newspapers and wanbao quanshu. The latter commonly ran the subtitle wanshi buqiuren (“myriad matters you won’t need to ask”), which underscored their mission: self-education. They had titles like Riyong wanshi baoku choushi bixu, which could be rendered “Treasury of all daily things necessary for social relations” or (more idiomatically) “How to win friends and influence people.” Wanbao quanshu were the contemporaneous counterparts of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History and Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. They flourished in Republican-era China, the same time frame that Joan Shelley Rubin identified as the heyday of American middlebrow culture. In societies where a wide gap opens up between elite and pulp literature, where literacy is growing but access to higher education is still restricted, where modernizing forces arouse both optimism and anxiety, middlebrow bridges those divides and makes sense of rapid change. Those conditions certainly prevailed in China, the United States, and Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, but not only then. Middlebrow has a very long history: wanbao quanshu can be traced back to the seventeenth century. And how about eighteenth-century Europe? Two generations ago historians studied the High Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau, one generation ago Robert Darnton discovered a Low Enlightenment of Grub-Street hacks and smut-mongers, and now a team of young scholars at Radboud University in the Netherlands are creating the database MEDIATE: Middlebrow Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe (1665–1820).