Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Submerged Experimentation in Middlebrow Modernist Fiction

Fisher, Allison Lynn

Abstract Details

2011, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.

This dissertation explores the concept of submerged experimentation in middlebrow fiction of the modernist period. Disputing criticism that posits a “great divide” between highbrow modernism and middlebrow culture of the modernist period, I argue that middlebrow modernist authors were aware of and informed about highbrow modernist writers, adapting their innovative techniques to middlebrow publishing venues and readerships. From this process of adaptation emerged covertly experimental narrative techniques that my dissertation works to recover, document, and situate within the broader context of modernist studies.

The dissertation reexamines middlebrow texts from the modernist period through the critical lenses of postclassical narratology, feminist theory, and material-historical approaches to literature. The result of this integrative approach is a project which describes and classifies the formal and thematic concerns of middlebrow modernists while also engaging in the rhetorical study of specific texts. Even as I use a rhetorical approach, I also complement that approach with archival research aimed at reconstructing the original conditions of the texts' production and reception – in order to identify how and why middlebrow modernist works had the effects they did. Each chapter brings a canonical highbrow modernist work into dialogue with a middlebrow modernist work to illustrate the similarities in their experimental impulses, as well as the strategic differences influenced by audience, market, and gender: Virginia Woolf’s and Margaret Ayer Barnes’s uses of the domestic in Mrs. Dalloway and Edna His Wife, H.D.'s and Zelda Fitzgerald’s intertextual constructions of character in Asphodel and “Miss Ella,” and Edith Wharton’s and Winifred Holtby’s experimentations with the tested woman plot in The Age of Innocence and South Riding. The dissertation concludes that middlebrow women writers were in fact using – but also repurposing – highbrow experimental techniques in their fiction, in ways that have not yet received adequate scholarly recognition.

In the past several decades, scholars in working in fields ranging from literary history to the study of popular culture have developed theories about artistic experimentation and the distinctions among high, middle, and lowbrow artifacts and practices. However, my dissertation illuminates a crucial issue that has been overlooked – namely, that middlebrow authors were not only aware of the highbrow modernist movement, but also actively incorporated highbrow modernist experimental impulses and techniques into their work. By recovering these buried relationships, my project corrects the critical tradition that views middlebrow texts as lacking formal integrity; the dissertation thus rethinks conventional definitions of the middlebrow to offer a more nuanced understanding of the range of experimentation in modernist fiction. By focusing on modes of submerged experimentation in middlebrow texts, I develop new ways of characterizing the distinction between high and middlebrow as it was understood and practiced in the modernist period. In the process, I seek to intervene in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of modernism itself. Ultimately, my reexamination of middlebrow modernism will help to reframe current understandings of how women writers helped shape modernist practices.

David Herman, PhD (Advisor)
Brian McHale, PhD (Committee Member)
James Phelan, PhD (Committee Member)
Robyn Warhol, PhD (Committee Member)
211 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Fisher, A. L. (2011). Submerged Experimentation in Middlebrow Modernist Fiction [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1298475770

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Fisher, Allison. Submerged Experimentation in Middlebrow Modernist Fiction. 2011. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1298475770.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Fisher, Allison. "Submerged Experimentation in Middlebrow Modernist Fiction." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1298475770

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)