Literary prizes, women, and the middlebrow

Annual literary prizes began life in 1903 in France with the founding of the Prix Goncourt, and they have proliferated there more than in other nations. Yet prizes are not always greeted by their recipient with unalloyed joy: an “antiprize rhetoric” is part of the standard response for to win the Goncourt, for example, “tient à la fois du banc d’infamie et de la légion d’Honneur,” as Sylvie Ducas puts it. Though of immense advantage to an author’s career and financial fortune, prizes are tainted not only by the cynical assumption of a corrupt relationship between publishing houses and juries, but also by the incompatibility between the image of the writer as solitary, authentic, and aesthetically ahead of his or her time, and the fact that prizes mean a large mainstream readership. Prizes, in other words, are demeaningly middlebrow. Women, unsurprisingly, have formed a small minority of prizewinners, and when they do win their response tends to be more positive than that of their male counterparts. The history of women and prizes, including the women-only jury of the Prix Femina (1905) and the readers’ jury of the Prix des Lectrices de Elle (1969), forms the context of this article. Countering the dominant view of prizes, particularly the “feminine” prizes, as favoring a “réalisme accessible au grand public” incompatible with the authentically literary, I use analysis of two (not untypical) twenty-first-century winners of, respectively, the Femina (Léonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre, 2013) and the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle (Claudie Gallay’s Les Déferlantes, 2008) to argue that these can also be sites of the “middlebrow” in a much more positive sense. That is, prizes may consecrate and promote work that combines the page-turning pleasure of immersive fiction with serious exploration of historical and ethical concerns, through writing that is at once accessible and formally inventive

Art · Audience measurement · Context (archaeology) · Jury · Linguistics · Literature · Mainstream · Middlebrow · Political science · Publishing · Regret · Rhetoric · Sociology · French Literature and Criticism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy