Reading the middle: US women novelists and print culture, 1930-1960

"Reading the Middle: US Women Novelists and Print Culture, 1930-1960" is about feminist protest as a core value of the American bourgeoisie, bringing gender studies, digital humanities, and American literature and print culture together in analyses of a collection of thirty-plus novels of mid-twentieth-century women writers. In it, I argue that the women writers of mainstream fiction in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s summoned carefully circumscribed deployments of critical paradigms such as feminism, antiracism, and anticapitalism to allow their American middle-class audience to elevate their leisure reading to a passively productive exercise in intellectual stimulation. In so doing, these writers helped establish and refine a uniquely twentieth-century phase of American progressivism that persisted long past their individual novels' fame