Faced with a huge volume of material, Hilliard wisely choses to focus on three organized movements: 1) the amateur writers' circles associated with the burgeoning number of correspondence schools of writing, writers' advice manuals, and middlebrow magazines and newspapers; 2) working-class writers and writing in the 1930s; and 3) writing by both civilians and soldiers during World War II.

By the middle of the 20th century, argued Macdonald, the nation's high culture was being debased by the growing influence of middlebrow trash.

Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (1990); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism and the Atomic Age (1995); and Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992).

King's staple characters, a middlebrow female protagonist and a "low" hero, customarily undergo inverse transformations during the course of a narrative.

One of the most compelling studies of fin-de-siecle cultural feminism has been offered by Teresa Mangum, whose reading of Sarah Grand's feminist fiction in Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman reveals the degree to which a sector of feminists at the time were seeking to produce attractive feminist alternatives to the more radical disaffection associated with New Woman fiction.

The Vice guillotine falls on everyone and anyone, the just and the tinjust, and miraculously makes fashion-bashing something more than comedy or a middlebrow one-liner in Us Weekly.

She liked everything, from opera and ballet to Shakespeare, melodrama and operetta and here Mr Schoch concentrates on her 'patronage of lowbrow and middlebrow entertainment' because this is where her influence had greatest effect.

With their middlebrow readership, the shukanshi have an influence that goes far beyond their combined circulation of 500,000.

Bloom and his faithless wife Molly are enthusiastic consumers of middlebrow erotica (such as the novel Sweets of Sin by M.

In short, I contend that Rufus Jones was the seminal figure in making mysticism middlebrow in the interwar period.

Christina Klein is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (University of California Press, 2003).

What women were reading and writing about in between and beyond the two World Wars is discussed in The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism by Nicola Humble (Oxford University Press, 45 [pounds sterling]).