Imperial Middlebrow

The collection Imperial Middlebrow, edited by Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch, takes middlebrow studies further in two ways. First, it focuses on the role middlebrow writing played in the popularisation and dissemination of imperial ideology. It combines the interest in the wider function of literature for a colonial society with close scrutiny of the ideological and socio-economic contexts of writers and readers. The essays cover the Girl’s Own Paper, fiction about colonial India including its appearance in Scottish writing, the West Indies, the South Pacific, as well as illustrations of Haggard’s South African imperial romances. Second, the volume proposes using the concept of the middlebrow as an analytical tool to read recent Black and Asian British as well as Nigerian fiction. Christoph Ehland is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn (Germany). He has published on Scottish writing, writer’s biographies and cultural conceptions of space and mobility from the early modern period to the present.He is co-editor of Middlebrow and Gender: 1890-1945 (Brill, 2016). Jana Gohrisch is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at Leibniz University Hannover (Germany). She has published two monographs, one on Black British literature and one on 19th-century British emotion cultures, and co-edited collections, including Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines (Brill, 2013).