Abstract
This project will investigate the public-oriented literary culture of the interwar years, a vast and multi-faceted area that has thus far never been systematically researched. Public-oriented literary culture, understood not only as a set of texts but primarily as a social and cultural practice, is specified here as ?middlebrow?, a concept fruitfully used in international research. Building on the results of international research, this project aims to apply the concept ?middlebrow? to the Dutch interwar years. Central question is: in what ways did ?middlebrow? manifest itself, both institutionally and discursively, as a literary field or subfield, with its own institutions and actors, with its own programme, conceptions of literature and qualitative hierarchy. This question will be addressed in three subprojects, each directed at one of the domains in which literary middlebrow manifests itself: literary production (authors and texts), distribution (publishers, book clubs, book series) and reception (literary criticism and journals).