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Table of Contents
Section I: Recommended Starting Points
To begin research, we recommend some open-access items : three in academic journals from different disciplines, and one on a blog:
- Brown, Erica (ed.), ‘Investigating the Middlebrow’, special issue of Working Papers on the Web, vol 11, July 2008
- Chowrimootoo, Christopher and Kate Guthrie (convenors),’Colloquy: Musicology and the Middlebrow‘, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 73, no 2, 2020, 327–395
- Hammill, Faye. ‘Middlebrow – Feelings and Fury‘, Anthem Press Blog, 2018
- Holmes, Diana (ed.), ‘Middlebrow’, special issue of Belphégor, vol 15, no 2, 2017
See also our page ‘Defining the Middlebrow‘ on this site. The list of Modern Critical Discussions below contains the most directly relevant items. You can download a longer version of the list, including many works by members of the Middlebrow Network, here: Middlebrow_Bibliography_Long
Section II: Early and Mid-Twentieth-Century Texts
- Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957)
- Benedict, Ruth, Patterns of Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1935)
- Bennett, Arnold, Literary Taste (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909)
- Blackwell, Basil et al., The Book World (London: Thomas Nelson, 1935)
- Chapman, Guy, Culture and Survival (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940)
- Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise (London: Routledge, 1938)
- Davies, Margaret Llewellyn ed. Life As We Have Known It (London: Hogarth Press, 1931; Virago, 1977) [contains introduction by Virginia Woolf]
- Drew, Elizabeth, The Modern Novel: Some Aspects of Contemporary Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926)
- Goldring, Douglas, The Nineteen Twenties (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945)
- Hunt, Cecil, Ink in my Veins (London: Robert Hale, 1948)
- Hutchinson, A. S. M., Bring Back the Days (London: Michael Joseph, 1958)
- Jackson, Holbrook, The Eighteen Nineties (London: Grant Richards, 1913: Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1939)
- Jenkinson, A. J., What do Boys and Girls Read? (London: Methuen, 1940: Second edition with new Appendix, 1946)
- Leavis, F. R., Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: The Minority Press, 1930)
- Leavis, F. R. and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933)
- Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Pimlico, 2000; first pub. 1932)
- Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life 1, trans. John Moore, (London: Verso, 1991. Orig. published as Critique de la vie quotidienne I: Introduction, Paris: Grasset, 1947)
- Lynes, Russell, ‘High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow’, Life, (April 11 1949)
- Lynes, Russell, The Taste-Makers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954)
- Mackenzie, Compton, Literature in My Time (London: Rich and Cowan, 1933)
- Mannin, Ethel Confessions and Impressions (London: Jarrolds, 1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1937)
- Mitford, Nancy (ed), Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy(London: Penguin, 1956)
- Orwell, George, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1969)
- Priestley, J. B. ‘High, Low, Broad.’ In Open House: A Book of Essays (London: Heinemann, 1927)
- Swinnerton, Frank, Background with Chorus: A Footnote to Changes in English Literary Fashion Between 1901 and 1917 (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1956)
- Swinnerton, Frank, Figures in the Foreground: Literary Reminiscences 1917-1940 (London: Hutchinson & Co,1937, rev. edn. 1963)
- Swinnerton, Frank, The Georgian Literary Scene 1910-1935 (London: Hutchinson & Co,1935; rev. edn. 1969)
- Ward, A. C., The Nineteen-Twenties: Literature and Ideas in the Post-War Decade (London: Methuen, 1930)
- West, Rebecca, “The Tosh Horse.” The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)
- Woolf, Leonard, Hunting the Highbrow (London: Hogarth Press, 1927)
- Woolf, Virginia, The Death of the Moth (London: Hogarth Press, 1942)
- Young, G. M., “The New Cortegiano” in Daylight and Champaign (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937) Reprint in Davison, Meyersohn, and Shils, vol.5, 3-21.
Section III: Modern Critical Discussions
- Alsop, Derek and Chris Walsh, The Practice of Reading: Interpreting the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1998)
- Alsop, Elizabeth, Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019)
- Anderson, Rachel, The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-literature of Love (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974)
- Ardis, Ann, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
- Ardis, Ann and Patrick Collier (eds), Transatlantic Print Culture 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
- Ardis, Ann and Leslie W. Lewis (eds). Women’s Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)
- Ashley, Bob, The Study of Popular Fiction: A Source Book (London: Pinter, 1989)
- Ayers, David. English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
- Baker, Niamh, Happily Ever After?: Women’s Fiction in Postwar Britain 1945-60 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989)
- Baldwin, Dean, Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880-1950 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013)
- Barber, Karin, The Generation of Plays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)
- Barker, Francis, et al. 1936: The Sociology of Literature (Colchester: The University of Essex, 1979)
- Barker, Clive and Maggie B. Gale (eds). British Theatre Between the Wars, 1918-1939. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
- Baxendale, John, Priestley’s England: J. B. Priestley and English Culture (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007)
- Baxendale, J. and C. Pawling, Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making; 1930-Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996)
- Beauman, Nicola, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39 (London: Virago, 1983)
- Beddoe, Deirdre. Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars 1918-1939 (London: Pandora Press, 1989)
- Beetham, Margaret, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Women’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London: Routledge, 1996)
- Bennett, Tony, David Carter, Modesto Gayo, Michelle Kelly, and Greg Noble (eds.), Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions (London & New York: Routledge, 2020)
- Benthien, Claudia, Jordis Lau and Maraike M. Marxsen, The Literariness of Media Art (London: Routledge, 2018)
- Bingham, Adrian, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2004)
- Blair, Amy L., Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011)
- Blair, Amy L. Tasting and Testing Books: Good Housekeeping, Popular Modernism, and Middlebrow Reading. (U of Massachusetts P, 2024).
- Blanch, Sophie and Melissa Sullivan (eds) ‘The Middlebrow – Within or Without Modernism’, special issue of Modernist Cultures, vol 6, no 1, May 2011
- Bloom, Clive, (2nd edition) Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009)
- Bloom, Clive ed. Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, 1900-1929. Vol.1 of 3. (London: Longman, 1993)
- Bloom, Harold (ed.). British Women Fiction Writers, 1900-1960: Volume One (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997)
- Bluemel, Kristin, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
- Bluemel, Kristin, Intermodernism: Writing and Culture in Interwar and Wartime Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)
- Bluemel, Kristin and Michael McCluskey (eds), Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
- Bogen, Anna, Women’s University Fiction, 1880-1945 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014)
- Bonham-Carter, Victor. Authors by Profession (London: The Society of Authors, 1978)
- Botshon, Lisa and Meredith Goldsmith (eds) Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (Northeastern University Press, 2003)
- Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). Orig. published as La Distinction, Critique sociale du judgement (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979)
- Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993)
- Bracco, Rosa Maria, Betwixt and Between: Middlebrow Fiction and English Society in the 20s and 30s (Victoria: The University of Melbourne, 1990)
- Bracco, Rosa Maria. Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993)
- Briganti, Chiara and Kathy Mezei, Domestic Modernism, The Interwar Novel and EH Young (Ashgate, 2006)
- Bromley, Roger, Lost Narratives (London: Routledge, 1988)
- Brown, Erica and Mary Grover (eds) Middlebrow Literary Cultures: the Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960 (Palgrave, 2012)
- Brown, Erica, Comedy and the Feminine Middlebrow Novel: Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013)
- Brown, Judith, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)
- Cannadine, David, Class in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
- Cadogan, Mary, and Patricia Craig. Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978)
- Carey, John, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)
- Carter, David, Almost Always Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013)
- Carter, David, “Middlebrow Book Culture.” In Hanquinet, Laurie and Mike Savage (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture (London: Routledge, 2016)
- Casey, Janet, A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
- Casey, Janet, Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today’s Classroom (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2015)
- Cavaliero, Glen, The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1977)
- Chowrimootoo, Christopher, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018)
- Chowrimootoo, Christopher, Kate Guthrie, John Howland, Andrew Flory, Chris McDonald, Heather Wiebe, and Richard Taruskin (eds.), “Colloquy: Musicology and the Middlebrow”, special issue of Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol 73, no 2, Summer 2020
- Christ, Birte. Modern Domestic Fiction: Popular Feminism, Mass-Market Magazines, and Middle-Class Culture, 1905-1925 (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2012)
- Church Gibson, Pamela, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London: Berg, 2012)
- Clay, Catherine, Time and Tide: The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
- Cockburn, Claud, Bestseller: The Books That Everyone Read, 1900-1939 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)
- Cohen, Debra Rae, Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2002)
- Collini, Stefan, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
- Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
- Cottrell, Anna, London Writing of the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
- Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990)
- Crosland, Margaret, Beyond the Lighthouse: English Women Novelists in the Twentieth Century (London: Constable, 1981)
- Crossick, Geoffrey, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain: 1870-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977)
- Crossick, Geoffrey and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe: 1780-1914 (London: Routledge, 1995)
- Cuddy-Keane, Melba, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
- Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
- D’Monté, Rebecca, British Theatre and Performance: 1900-1950 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
- Daunais, Isabelle, and Allan Hepburn (eds.), Diplomacy and the Modern Novel: France, Britain, and the Mission of Literature (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2020)
- Darwood, Nicola, and Nick Turner, Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction: ‘Have Women a Sense of Humour?’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020)
- Davis, Fred, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992)
- Davis, Lennard J., Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987)
- Davison, Peter, Rolf Meyersohn, and Edward Shils, eds., Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication. 14 vols. (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey; Teaneck, New Jersey: Somerset House, 1978)
- Dawson, Graham, Imagining Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994)
- Deen, Stella (ed.). Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914-45 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)
- DiBattista, Maria and McDiarmid, Lucy, eds., High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
- Dines, Martin, The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spatial Complexity in Metropolitan America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
- Dowson, Jane. Women, Modernism and British Poetry 1910-1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)
- Driscoll, Beth, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
- Eagleton, Mary, Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
- Eagleton, Terry, Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (London: Verso, 1986)
- Eagleton, Terry, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1976)
- Earle, David M., Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks and the Prejudice of Form (Ashgate, 2009)
- Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979)
- Edmondson, Belinda, Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2009)
- Egan, Gerald (ed.), Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
- Eldridge Miller, Jane, Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (London: Virago, 1994)
- Faulkner, Sally, A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society, 1910-2010 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)
- Faulkner, Sally, Middlebrow Cinema (London: Routledge, 2016)
- Felski, Rita, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000)
- Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)
- Felski, Rita, “Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of Consumption.” In The Gender of Modernity 61-89. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard Press, 1995)
- Ferguson, Marjorie, Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity (London: Heinemann, 1983)
- Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980)
- Fleishman, Avrom, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971)
- Flint, Kate, The Woman Reader 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)
- Fraser, Robert and Mary Hammond (eds) Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture; Volume 2: Perspectives from South Asia (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008)
- Freund, Elizabeth, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987)
- Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
- Furbank, P. N., Unholy Pleasure: The Idea of Social Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
- Furbank, P. N. “The Twentieth-Century Best-Seller.” In The Pelican Guide to English Literature: The Modern Age. Ed. Boris Ford. 429-441. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961)
- Gale, Maggie B. West End Women: Women and the London Stage 1918-1962 (London: Routledge, 1996)
- Gan, Wendy, Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century British Writing (Palgrave, 2009)
- Gans, Herbert J., Popular Culture and High Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1974)
- Gindin, James, British Fiction in the 1930s: The Dispiriting Decade (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)
- Garrett, Leah, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015)
- Garrity, Jane. Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
- Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 3 vols. Volume I: The War of the Words, Volume II: Sexchanges, Volume III: Letters from the Front (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988, 1989, 1994)
- Giles, Judy. The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004)
- Giles, Judy and Tim Middleton (eds). Writing Englishness 1900-1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity (London: Routledge, 1995)
- Golden, Amanda, Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (London: Routledge, 2020)
- Goldman, Dorothy with Jane Gledhill and Judith Hattaway. Women Writers and the Great War (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995)
- González, Octavio R., Misfit Modernism: Queer Forms of Double Exile in the Twentieth-Century Novel (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020)
- Gough-Yates, Anna, Understanding Women’s Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readerships (London: Routledge, 2003)
- Grasl, Caterina, Oedipal Murders and Nostalgic Resurrections: The Victorians in Historical Middlebrow Fiction, 1914-1959 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014)
- Greenberg, Jonathan, Modernism, Satire and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
- Greenslade, William, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
- Grieve, Victoria, The Federal Art Project and Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009)
- Griffin, Gabriele (ed.). Difference in View: Women and Modernism (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994)
- Gronow, Jukka, The Sociology of Taste (London: Routledge, 1997)
- Grover, Mary, The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (Associated University Presses, 2009)
- Grover, Mary. Steel City Readers: Reading for Pleasure in Sheffield, 1925-1955 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023)
- Guillory, John, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993)
- Habermann, Ina, Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier and the Symbolic Form of Englishness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010)
- Hall, John, The Sociology of Literature (London: Longman, 1979)
- Hammill, Faye, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010)
- Hammill, Faye, Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (University of Texas Press, 2007)
- Hammill, Faye and Mark Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2016)
- Hammill, Faye and Michelle Smith, Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture: Canadian Periodicals in English and French, 1925-1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015)
- Hammond, Mary, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)
- Hanscombe, Gillian and Virginia Smyers. Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910-1940 (London: The Women’s Press, 1987)
- Hapgood, L. and N. Paxton, eds., Outside Modernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)
- Harker, Jaime, America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novel, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 2007)
- Harker, Jamie, Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America (Minneapolis and Saint Paul: Minnesota University Press, 2013)
- Hartley, Jenny. Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War (London: Virago, 1994)
- Hartley, Jenny, Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (London: Virago, 1997)
- Hewitt, Douglas, English Fiction of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940 (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman, 1988)
- Hilliard, Christopher, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)
- Hinds, Hilary, ‘Ordinary Disappointments: Femininity, Domesticity, and Nation in British Middlebrow Fiction, 1920-1944’ in Modern Fiction Studies, vol 55, no 2 Summer 2009
- Holmes, Diana, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018)
- Hopkins, Chris, Neglected Texts, Forgotten Contexts (Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University, 1994)
- Horwood, Catherine, Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class Between the Wars (The History Press: 2005)
- Howland, John, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2009)
- Hubble, Nick, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
- Hubble, Nick (ed.), ‘Middlebrow London’ special issue of Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, vol 9, no 1, March 2011
- Hubble, Nick, Luke Seaber, and Elinor Taylor (eds.), The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)
- Humble, Nicola, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
- Humm, Peter, Paul Stignant and Peter Widdowson, eds. Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History (London: Methuen, 1986)
- Hutner, Gordon, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
- Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988)
- Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head 1990; Pimlico edition, 1992)
- Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1978; Orig. Der Akt des lesens: theorie Ästhetishcher Wirkung Munich: Fink, 1976)
- Ingram, Angela and Daphne Patai(eds). Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889-1939 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
- Jaillant, Lise, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014)
- Joannou, Maralou, Ladies, Please Don’t Smash These Windows: Women’s Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change, 1918-1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1995)
- Joannou, Maroula, ed., The History of British Women’s Writing: 1920-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Joannou, Maroula, ed., Women Writers of the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Unversity Press, 1999)
- Joannou, Maralou and Claire Nicholson, eds., The Women Aesthetes: British Writers, 1870-1900 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013)
- Johnson G. M. ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists Between the Wars (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998)
- Kammen, Michael, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)
- Kaplan, Carola M. and Anne B. Simpson, eds., Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996)
- Karoula, Rania, The Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939: Engagement and Experimentation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
- Kelly, Alice, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
- Kelly, Jessica, “‘To fan the ardour of the layman’: The Architectural Review, The MARS Group and the cultivation of middle class audiences for modernism in Britain, 1933-1940″, Journal of Design History, 29.4 (November 2016), pp 360-365
- Kennedy, Sue, and Jane Thomas (eds.), British Women’s Writing, 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020)
- Kermode, Frank, Essays on Fiction 1971-82 (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1983)
- Keyser, Catherine, Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
- Klein, Christina, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (University of California Press, 2003)
- Knight, Stephen, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
- Konchar Farr, Cecilia, The Ulysses Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
- Konchar Farr, Cecilia and Tom Perrin (eds.), The Middlebrow: A Special Cluster (Yale University Online): http://post45.research.yale.edu/
- Lacy, Tim, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
- Langbauer, Laurie, Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930 (London: Cornell University Press, 1999)
- Lassner, Phyllis, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire (Rutgers University Press, 2004)
- Lassner, Phyllis, Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
- Latham, Sean, Am I A Snob? Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2003)
- Laurenson, Diana T. and Alan Swingewood, The Sociology of Literature (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972)
- Laurie, Kedrun, “Who read Richard Jefferies? The evidence of the North fund subscription list.”, Richard Jefferies Society Journal, 18 (2009) pp 6-30
- Lawrie, Alexandra, The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885-1910 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
- LeMahieu, D. L., A Culture For Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (Clarendon Press, 1988)
- Levine, Lawrence, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)
- Lewis, John, The Left Book Club: An Historical Record. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1970)
- Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991)
- Lonsdale, Sarah, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020)
- Lonsdale, Sarah, The Journalist in British Fiction and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
- Low, Rachel, Film Making in 1930s Britain (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985)
- Lucas, John, The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2000)
- Lurz, John, The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)
- Macdonald, Kate (ed), The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950: What Mr Miniver Read (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
- Macdonald, Kate and Christoph Singer (eds), Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880-1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
- MacKay, Marina and Lyndsey Stonebridge (eds) British Fiction After Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
- MacKenzie, John M. ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)
- MacKillop, Ian, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1995)
- Maddison, Isobel, Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden (London: Ashgate, 2013)
- Mangan, J. A. and James Walvin. Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987)
- Marcus, Laura, Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Late Victorian Into Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
- Maslen, Elizabeth, Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2014)
- Maslen, Elizabeth. Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928-1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)
- McAleer, Joseph, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914-1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
- McDonald, Louise, Clemence Dane: Forgotten Feminist Writer of the Inter-War Years (London: Routledge, 2020)
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