Abstract
This afterword draws together observations about the single woman, modernity, and literary culture during the 1920s to the 1940s, and reflects on their relevance today. It explores how brow boundaries are still invoked in discussions about taste and cultural capital in transatlantic press of the twenty-first century. It also suggests the single woman has remained a prevalent figure in popular culture and is still widely discussed and heavily scrutinized in cultural and literary discourse. It suggests that both brow boundaries and the single woman have retained their capacity to provoke anxiety and debate.
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Notes
- 1.
Meredith Jaffe, “Middlebrow: What’s So Shameful About Writing a Book And Hoping It Sells?,” The Guardian, November 5, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books; and Beth Driscoll, “Could Not Put It Down,” Sydney Review of Books, October 20, 2015, http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/could-not-put-it-down/.
- 2.
Driscoll, “Could Not Put It Down.”
- 3.
Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 4.
Macy Halford, “On Middlebrow,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-middlebrow.
- 5.
Devin Friedman, “Middlebrow: The Taste That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” GQ, June 10, 2011, http://www.gq.com/story/middlebrow-culture.
- 6.
Claire Coleman, “Middlebrow and Proud: Experts Say It’s Time to Embrace Middle-of-the-Road Tastes (So You Can Stop Pretending To Love Opera!),” The Mail on Sunday, August 1, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/.
- 7.
Thomas Mallon and Pankaj Mishra, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow—Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore?,” The New York Times, July 29, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/books/.
- 8.
This is a mere snapshot of the single woman in contemporary culture; for a much more detailed analysis see: Anthea Taylor, Single Women in Popular Culture: The Limits of Postfeminism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 9.
Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own (New York: Broadway Books, 2015).
- 10.
Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
- 11.
Anne Kingston, “The Single Woman is a Force in Society—and a Ghost in our Culture,” Maclean’s, February 25, 2016, http://www.macleans.ca/society/.
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Sterry, E. (2017). Afterword: Legacies. In: The Single Woman, Modernity, and Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40829-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40829-3_6
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