|
What we have been talking about a lot here is genre snobs.
But what about intellectual snobs?
In UK there is a sort of intellectual snobbery related to class (always a key issue in UK), whereby the height of an imaginary reader's forehead is invoked.
High brow, middle brow, airport novels.
This is a form of class coding, I think. Highbrow books are read by public school old boys (and girls), university professors, and judges of literary prizes.
Middle brow books are read by lower-and middle-middle class people who "think they are reading Literature."
The rest read airport novels. Presumably they don't have brows.
A version of this runs in Australia. Half a century ago the leading lights of "literature" in Australia, or at least Victoria, were Vance Palmer and his missus. Vance Palmer won this literary prize and that literary prize, was toasted in the media... Way down the bottom of the totem pole was Arthur Upfield who wrote detective stories.
Today Upfield is still in print, still enjoyed. Upfield earned a living as a writer. The Palmers didn't; they were well heeled. The Palmers are forgotten, but Upfield lives on, triumphant.
(Upfield had fun satirising this setup in one of his Bony detective novels; the Palmers appeared, thinly disguised, and he himself appeared, also thinly disguised. The book was called "An Author Bites the Dust."
|