middlebrow
1
8.2
- noun
- /ˈmɪdəlˌbraʊ/
- Literature
:
mediocre
- Many popular novels are considered middlebrow because they appeal to a wide audience without being overly intellectual.
- middlebrow fiction
- middlebrow non-fiction
- middlebrow ethnographic
Examples
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But I was relieved to discover that this is no Merchant-and-Ivory-style middlebrow adaptation.
Blog text (1) -
Instead of finding a readership of domestic fiction between the categories of romance and highbrow literature, the genre of the ethnographic middlebrow finds a readership balanced somewhere between adventure stories and elite science.
Academic text (2014) -
Understood as legitimate media for Chinese high art in Korea, they were considered middlebrow works in China.
Academic text (2015) -
One was that high culture and discriminating taste would be washed away by a middlebrow culture and by the cult of merely useful information.
Academic text (1997) -
By mid-century, then, the magazine seems to have become a touchstone of the non-fiction middlebrow.
Academic text (2014) -
Kate Macdonald's The Masculine Middlebrow is the first book-length study that takes the non-fiction middlebrow as its topic.
Academic text (2014) -
Burnett's work paired aspects of the emerging middlebrow with what Stephen Slemon once called the "middle ground" of Canadian culture, uncomfortably located between colonizing and colonized culture.
Academic text (2014) -
Sir John Reith's British Broadcasting Corporation was an inherently unstable solution to the puzzle of how to provide for the needs of highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow audiences, and how to have a coherent view of the purpose of public provision without having that view dictated by government.
Academic text (1997) -
Despite the welcome and significant work the field of middlebrow scholarship has undertaken to shift the terms of literary study toward discussions of non-canonical texts and tastes, it has remained in thrall to fiction, and non-fiction texts such as Burnett's, though widely read in their own day, remain understudied.
Academic text (2014) -
The art exhibit featured several middlebrow pieces that attracted visitors looking for enjoyable yet approachable works.
Antonyms
How Intellectual
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
Middlebrow comes from putting middle together with brow, following the idea of highbrow and lowbrow because brow suggested the 'forehead' and cleverness. So middlebrow art or books aim for 'average' tastes, not very challenging but not purely simple entertainment.