This study examines the way Britten's operas and their audiences muddied the waters of the so-called "great divide" between modernism and mass culture, mediating between the aesthetics of difficulty and distinction on the one hand, and the pleasures and conventions associated with popular opera on the other. Using the fraught responses of early critics as a way in, I examine the precise musical and critical strategies through which the operas confounded a range of marked modernist binaries - between innovation and tradition, difficulty and sentimentality, modernism and mass culture. One of the main appeals of Britten's operas, I argue, lay in providing mid-century audiences with the chance to have their modernist cake and eat it, to revel in the putatively "cheap" pleasures of consonance, lyricism and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that flows from rejecting them. / Music

The concept of ‘middlebrow’ literature in the twentieth century, which received minimal critical attention from the Leavises onwards, has recently become a site of literary and sociological interest, especially regarding the interwar period. This thesis considers the ways in which a corporate middlebrow identity, amongst an intangible community of like-minded readers, was affected by a popularity of the fantastic in the 1920s and 1930s. This subgenre, which I term the ‘domestic fantastic’ (in which one or more elements of the fantastic intrude into an otherwise normalised domestic world) allowed middlebrow authors and readers to focalise and interrogate anxieties affecting the status of the home and its inhabitants which were otherwise either too taboo or, conversely, too well-worn for a traditional, non-fantastic examination. This fantastic vogue was largely initiated by the success of David Garnett’s metamorphosis novel Lady Into Fox (1922), which prepared the way for the other novels discussed in this thesis, predominantly Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew (1926), Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms (1926), Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child (1927), John Collier’s His Monkey Wife (1930) and Green Thoughts (1932), and Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves (1940). Through the lenses of metamorphosis, creation, and witchcraft, these novels respond to and reformulate contemporary debates concerning sexuality in marriage, childlessness, and autonomous space for unmarried women. The ‘middlebrow fantasy’ of the stable, idealised home was being revealed as untenable, and the fantastic responded. During the interwar years, when assessments of British society were being widely recalibrated, the domestic fantastic was a subgenre which produced a select but significant range of novels which (whether playful or poignant, hopeful or tragic, nostalgic or progressive) provided the means for both author and reader to interrogate and comment upon the most pervading middle-class social anxieties, in unusual and revitalising ways.

This thesis provides the first extensive queer reading of a 'Golden Age' British detective fiction writer. The aim of this thesis is to assess queer potential in texts published by Agatha Christie between 1920 and 1952. Human identity can be read as self-consciously constructed in Christie's novels, which were written in a context of two world wars, advances in technology and communication, and what Michel Foucault called the 'medicalization' of Western culture. The self-conscious stereotyping in Christie's prose undermines her texts' conservative appeal to the status quo. Chapter One justifies this project's critique of identity essentialism in the texts by considering the manufacturing of 'Agatha Christie' as a widely-read celebrity author. Reading Christie's authorial identity as something established and refined through a market-driven response to readers' expectations and a conscious engagement with earlier forms of detective fiction provides space for reading identity itself as a stylized, performative, and sometimes parodic theme within the texts. In subsequent chapters, employing theoretical insights from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Lee Edelman, I explore Christie's participation in contemporary debates surrounding masculinity, femininity, and the importance of the family in shaping individual identity. Finally, I consider Christie's reputation in the twenty-first century by exploring nostalgic television adaptations of her work. Comparing the presentation of 'queer' characters in the literary texts to the adaptations' use of explicit homosexual themes and characters, I conclude that there is a stronger potential for 'queering' identity in the former. As the first full queer reading of a 'Golden Age' detective novelist, this thesis expands queer notions of archive and canonicity: few scholars to date have considered mainstream literary texts without overt LGBTQ+ themes or characters from a queer perspective. Given Christie's global reach and appeal, locating queerness in her texts means understanding queerness as fundamental to everyday culture. This means engaging with a subversive potential in twentieth century middlebrow conservatism.

This project recovers and revises late nineteenth and early twentieth-century narratives of mobility which invoke female protagonists who move from stifling, patriarchal domestic settings in the rural and suburban United States to the more symbolically emancipated settings of New York City and even Europe to reveal both the limitations and possibilities for women’s lives in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. By challenging popular American fiction’s preoccupation with urban white slavery myths and the lingering proscriptive standards for women’s behavior of the Victorian era, the Introduction argues the selected works of this dissertation mark a significant, but perhaps fleeting moment in American history when women were on the verge of profound gains toward equality. Chapter Two reads Gertrude Atherton’s late nineteenth-century interrogation of intimate and professional mobility in Patience Sparhawk as a significant precursor, if not prototype, of the recently recognized middlebrow moderns of the 1920s. Chapter Three examines Edith Wharton’s competing views of mobility and motherhood in The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Summer. Chapter Four aims to recover David Graham Phillips’ posthumously published novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, as a complicated engagement with unconventional views of mobility and prostitution in early twentieth-century America, and Chapter Five argues that Jessie Redmon Fauset’s oft-maligned, sentimental novel, Plum Bun, warrants more critical attention for its revolutionary efforts to imagine an alternative cultural aesthetic whereby young, aspiring African-American women can acquire intimate and professional fulfillment through an empowering transnational mobility. Recognizing how stories of fallen womanhood in American literature traditionally overemphasized and criminalized a woman’s desire for intimacy, while stories of New Womanhood often scripted characters ultimately devoid of desire and companionship, I argue Atherton, Wharton, Phillips and Fauset examine and challenge these categories of womanhood in important, often overlooked, depictions of mobility. Too often dismissed or excused for their conservativism, these authors warrant more attention from modern literary scholars for their shared, varied, and intentionally “moving” experiences for women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America.

No description available.

This thesis is a multi-sited survey providing insight into integral performing arts institutions and how they engage in the distribution of cosmopolitan cultural capital to middlebrow audiences. It additionally provides a taxonomy of the different types of performances present across three sites: MSC OPAS, Arts Midwest, and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ Annual Conference in New York (APAP/NYC). My research methods include ethnography, interviewing, and textual analysis, but my investigation of these sites began with several leading questions: How do audiences read live performances for cosmopolitanism? How is that cosmopolitanism produced in key performing arts organizations? How is performance both a product that is marketed to venues and audiences and the means of marketing itself? Cosmopolitanism is an integral component to marketing, delivering, and enjoying live touring commercial performances. Performing arts presenters like OPAS, and presenting organizations, including Arts Midwest and APAP, engage cosmopolitanism on multiple levels as they work to provide regional audiences with otherwise unattainable “world-class” performances. Cosmopolitanism is present and presented every step of the way and the industry continues to advance cosmopolitan goals. This works shifts from analyzing cosmopolitan tourists to understanding touring cosmopolitanism because touring performances provide cosmopolitan cultural capital to community audiences located outside these urban centers. Touring performances provide opportunities for residents outside large metropolitan areas to engage in a global culture of performance and insert themselves into an imagined community of cosmopolitans. This is due in part to touring artists who deliver “world-class” performances to audiences that would otherwise entirely lack a connection to arts opportunities that accompany metropolitan centers and cosmopolitan communities. Cosmopolitanism is operationalized in performances of rurality, organizational culture and sociability, and exoticizing marketing strategies. I not only explore how cosmopolitanism is operationalized across these sites, but also how performance, in several of its variations, is operationalized, negotiated, and, of course, presented. More specifically, I examine artistic, interpersonal, organizational, and economic performances, as they are present across the three sites.