Imagining adventure in Middlebrow fiction: Cosmopolitan Novels by Maurice Dekobra and Johan Fabricius

• Main Authors: Pieter Verstraeten, Karen van Hove
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Radboud University Press in cooperation with Open Journals 2015-06-01
• Series: Relief: Revue Électronique de Littérature Francaise
• Subjects: Maurice Dekobra; Johan Fabricius; middlebrow; adventure novel; cosmopolitanism
• Online Access: https://revue-relief.org/article/view/9089

The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of a new type of novel that straddled the divide between popular entertainment and legitimate culture by combining ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary forms and catering en masse for the tastes of an expanding middleclass reading public. In this article we want to explore the ways in which the novels La Madone des sleepings (1925) by the bestselling French novelist Maurice Dekobra and Venetiaansch avontuur [Venetian adventure] (1931) by the Dutch author Johan Fabricius fit into this broad category of the middlebrow novel and how their use of adventure as a structural devise might complicate the common view of the middlebrow novel as a form of domestic realism.