The Old Men and the Sea of Masscult : T S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Middlebrow Aesthetics

Uses American essayist Dwight Macdonald’s well-known critique of Hemingway’s and Eliot’s later works as middlebrow as the basis for his own examination of how the later The Old Man and the Sea, in contrast to the earlier “The Undefeated,” addresses the incoherencies of postwar modernist literature and thus reveals an opposing aesthetic philosophy. Perrin writes that The Old Man and the Sea “represents an author forced implicitly to acknowledge his middlebrow aesthetic because of an inability, despite his best efforts, to make his writing comprehensible in what had come to be accepted modernist terms.” Also published in The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular US Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945-75, 19-36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015