The Returning Reader: Canadian Serial Fiction and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna Novels

Abstract

There is still much work to be done on the dynamics of middlebrow fiction in English-Canadian literature, especially that from the early twentieth century. The majority of studies focus on either popular or modernist fiction, pointing out the often-blurred line between these two positions in the English-Canadian field of cultural production. Landmark studies of women writers include Carole Gerson’s work, Clarence Karr’s Authors and Audiences: Popular Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century (2000) and Glenn Willmott’s Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English (2002).¹ Such discussions of highbrow aspirations and popular achievements in the Canadian fiction market tend to neglect the mediating term, ‘the middlebrow’. Examination of the use of this term in a Canadian context provokes debate about distinctions of taste, the dynamics of gender, real and imagined audiences, popular and critical reception, ephemeral celebrity and canonical endurance. I propose that one starting point for an investigation of the middlebrow as a distinct phenomenon in Canadian literature is serial fiction from the first half of the twentieth century, more specifically from the modern period that spans 1920–1960. Recent British and American studies of the middlebrow open up a conceptual terrain for the study of Canadian serial fiction from this period that understands it as part of an international phenomenon with its own peculiar national inflections.