Imagining Adventure in Middlebrow Fiction: Cosmopolitan Novels by Maurice Dekobra and Johan Fabricius

Pieter Verstraeten, Karen Van Hove

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    Abstract

    The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of a new type of novel that straddled the divide between popular entertainment and legitimate culture by combining ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary forms and catering en masse for the tastes of an expanding middleclass reading public. In this article we want to explore the ways in which the novels La Madone des sleepings (1925) by the bestselling French novelist Maurice Dekobra and Venetiaansch avontuur [Venetian adventure] (1931) by the Dutch author Johan Fabricius fit into this broad category of the middlebrow novel and how their use of adventure as a structural device might complicate the common view of the middlebrow novel as a form of domestic realism.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)102-118
    Number of pages17
    JournalRelief
    Volume9
    Issue number1
    Publication statusPublished - 2015

    Keywords

    • bestsellers
    • middlebrow literature
    • popular literature
    • cosmopolitanism
    • adventure literature
    • interwar culture
    • French literature
    • Dutch literature
    • Maurice Dekobra
    • Johan Fabricius

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