Review

Abstract

JAIME HARKER. Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. The title of Jaime Harker’s recent study, Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, is, as Harker admits, ‘intentionally provocative’ (xiii–xiv). Not the ‘queer’ part of it, of course. More than twenty years of queer theory has succeeded in taking the sting out of that former pejorative as queer studies has become a mainstay of academia. Rather, it is the term ‘middlebrow’ in connection with Isherwood’s name that undoubtedly will raise a proverbial eyebrow or two. Yet, Harker’s study would recuperate this word too. Having emerged during the interwar period, ‘middlebrow,’ she writes, ‘can mean middle class, mediocre, reactionary, melodramatic, feminine, sentimental. Indeed, middlebrow is used as shorthand for conservative mainstream’ (xiv). Harker mobilizes this term for its subversive potential, ‘because of its role in American literary history and its potentially destabilizing critical valence’ (xiv).