The New Literary Middlebrow (PDF)

Beth Driscoll is Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

“The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century, is an excellent introduction to the mechanisms of literary appreciation and distribution in contemporary culture. … Driscoll’s account of the ‘new literary middlebrow’ makes this an essential book for literary critics and cultural scholars who want to understand contemporary reading culture.” (Jaime Harker, Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 22 (1), 2016)

"...Driscoll does a thorough and thoughtful job of working out the cultural and institutional dimensions of her analysis. In particular, she makes a strong case for there being a distinctively feminised mode of reading, which values affective identification with characters, which looks for a reflection of its own experiences in their lives, and which is 'ethical' in the sense of exercising moral judgement on a world that is taken to be close to the real world: this regime looks for 'stories of personal growth and moral redemption,' and sees reading 'as part of a larger project of moral improvement' (40)." John Frow, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature

"Driscoll is a lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, and while her book draws on theory and is written mainly for academic readers, it's highly accessible, especially for the people she's writing about, we literary middlebrows." Jane Sullivan, The Sydney Morning Herald