Book Reviews: Middlebrow Literary Cultures. Edited by Erica Brown and Mary Grover. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. & The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950: What Mr. Miniver Read. Edited by Kate MacDonald. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Middlebrow, they argue, is not just a type of literature that exists as a 'hapless aspirant' to the 'legitimate' stylistics of modernist writing (p. 4), but instead is defined as much by perceptions about its readership as by the familiar tendencies of its literary style: '[i]t has been defined through its consumers, argued to be members of the anathematised lower middle classes' (p. 1). [...]they argue that, as each literary text is a 'material object ... a signifier within many diverse but intersecting evaluative systems', it is no easy task to separate these systems into separate cultural 'brows' or categories (p. 3). Regarding the contribution of US based periodicals to the idea of 'middlebrow' as a cultural label, Sharon Hamilton's essay on the Smart Set continues the focus on the periodicals that have yet to receive adequate critical attention; her assertion that 'middlebrow magazines often managed to be influential - owing to their popular readership - while also acting as venues that stayed abreast of some of the most avant-garde movements of their time,' is a fascinating observation and an area to which further critical attention is due (p. 130). [...]Sue McPherson's chapter, 'Reading Class, Examining Men: Anthologies, Education and Literary Cultures', offers a convincing reading of the ways in which late-Victorian anthologies such as Stopford Brookes's Primer of English Literature (1874) and Charles Whibley's A Book of English Prose (1894) presented the reader with a 'hotch-potch' of literature that anticipated the middlebrow by implicitly promoting a passive style of literary consumption of 'suitable' works and extracts (p. 29).