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"Critical Edition"
In the 1950s, three esteemed critics, Jacques Barzun, W.H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling formed the editorial board of the Readers’ Subscription Book Club. That Club and its successor, The Mid-Century Book Club, had as their missions to bring sophisticated new and classic books to a general public. The essays these critics wrote individually as introductions [...]
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Forget Elia Kazan. When it comes to naming names in 1950s America no one was more ruthless than Dwight Macdonald, and he was at his most hostile in “Masscult & Midcult” (1960). This essay—jeremiad, really—is Macdonald’s crusade against what he deems “Midcult,” or middlebrow culture. As Louis Menand puts it in his [...]
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A blog by Lisa Levy about dead critics, a few live critics, and the nature of critical inquiry
