Regions, Maps, Readers: Theorizing Middlebrow Geography

Abstract

This article argues that endpaper maps in children’s and adult’s fictions, read in terms of the material contexts of the novels they illustrate and their specific historical contexts, point to new ways of conceiving and organizing middlebrow studies in relation to nation and region. It urges scholars interested in developing middlebrow studies beyond Anglophone cultures to pay greater attention to the materials and material cultures of the book. Based on a case study of endpaper maps by the English wood engraver Joan Hassall and illustrator E. H. Shepard, in novels by Francis Brett Young and A. A. Milne, respectively, it seeks to answer these questions: What kinds of illustrations, papers, endpapers, and designs, conveyed through what kinds of varied artistic, industrial, and commercial processes, are required for consumers in diverse regions to behold an object that they recognize as a “middlebrow book”? How are these materials and processes distinguished by region and more importantly, how do these materials and processes themselves produce ideologies of region? In short, how do book materials and processes create different kinds of regional middlebrows?

Keywords

• illustration
• literary maps
• middlebrow fiction
• imaginary geographies
• wood engraving
• cultural hierarchies