[Anthropgrad] Work-in-Progress Seminar - 27 March - David Carter

[Sharon Komidar]

The Research School of Humanities presents,
 Work-in-Progress Seminar Series 

1- 2.30 pm, Friday 27th March, Theatrette, Old Canberra House

The Making of the Australian Middlebrow: Middlebrow Book Culture in
Australia, 1920-1965 

Professor David Carter,

Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History at the
University of Queensland

 

The term 'middlebrow' emerged in Britain and the USA in the 1920s to
describe cultural tastes that were neither narrowly avant-garde nor
merely popular, and cultural forms that were widely accessible but still
made a claim on quality -- the 'good books' that were still 'good
reading' or as one Australian magazine put it, 'the books you should
read but will also enjoy reading'. Although the term itself is an
artefact of its period, no more substantive than its partners 'highbrow'
and 'lowbrow', it arose in response to real changes in cultural
structures under the twin pressures of high modernism and new forms of
urban popular culture; and it can be identified with new cultural
institutions, attitudes and audiences. Major studies of middlebrow book
culture have been written for Britain and the USA, in each case almost
entirely contained within the nation's domestic book trade and reading
public. 

 

But what of the Australian case, where book culture was largely
constituted around imported products? This seminar will examine whether
the institutions and values characteristic of the middlebrow emerged in
Australia, if so what forms they took, and how a cultural history
conducted through the idea of the middlebrow might change our
understanding of Australian culture. Thinking through the middlebrow
offers new perspectives on our understandings of the popular,
Australia's involvement in transnational cultural networks, and the
local histories of modernity. The seminar will also glance at
contemporary book cultures, where certain attributes of the middlebrow
seem to have made a comeback, as has the term itself. 

 

David Carter is Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History
at the University of Queensland, where he was previously Director of the
Australian Studies Centre. His most recent publications are The Ideas
Market: An Alternative Take on Australia's Intellectual Life (MUP 2004),
Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies
(Pearson 2006), and Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing
(UQP 2007, ed. With Anne Galligan). He is currently researching a
history of middlebrow book culture in Australia and American publishers
of Australian books.

 

Convenors: Ken Taylor and Stephen Foster
For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
All Welcome