Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
From Lowbrow to Nobrow

From Lowbrow to Nobrow

Peter Swirski

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral Sociology

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773530193
ISBN13: 9780773530195
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Oct 24 2005
Pages: 236
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

From Lobrow to Nobrow demolishes the elite argument that popular fiction and culture are the underside of civilization. In this innovative book, Peter Swirski goes beyond demonstrating that high-brow has been transformed to low-brow, showing that nobrow art is the interactive factor in the relationship between popular art and highbrow art.

Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an artform that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory.

Swirski then turns to three nobrow novels that have been largely ignored by critics. Examining the aesthetics of artertainment in Karel Capek's War with the Newts, Raymond Chandler's Playback, and Stanislaw Lem's Chain of Chance, crossover tours de force, From Lowbrow to Nobrow throws new light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics.

Also from

Peter Swirski

View All

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All