“It must be obvious to anyone that the volume and social weight of middlebrow culture, borne along as it has been by the great recent increase in the American middle class, have multiplied at least tenfold in the past three decades. This culture presents a more serious threat to the genuine article than the old-time pulp dime novel, Tin Pan Alley, Schund variety ever has or will. Unlike the latter, which has its social limits clearly marked out for it, middlebrow culture attacks distinctions as such and insinuates itself everywhere …. Insidiousness is of its essence, and in recent years its avenues of penetration have become infinitely more difficult to detect and block.” --Clement Greenberg
Annotated bibliography:
Holbo, John. "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow". Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made. 11/12/09
This is an article discussing an essay titled Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow by Russell Lynes. The essay itself goes into great detail, describing the differences between each class of "brow" and references several different essays on the discussion of each class with an emphasis on middlebrow, which is thought to have been coined by Virginia Woolf.
"It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go–betweens; they are the busy–bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between."
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