Middlebrow Culture, Self-mockery, and Maeve Brennan’s New Yorker Stories

Abstract

This article, attending to the periodical codes of The New Yorker and the magazine’s middlebrow brand of sophistication, explores the significance of Maeve Brennan’s satirical stories. While Brennan’s Irish background and Dublin stories have received critical attention, her New York stories have not yet been fully appreciated in relation to her long affiliation with The New Yorker and America’s smart magazine culture. Drawing on scholarship from periodical studies, middlebrow culture studies, and the cultural histories of The New Yorker, this article argues that the publication of The New Yorker provides a rich context in which to better understand Brennan’s satire and self-mockery as social commentaries that probe the middlebrow concerns of class anxiety and imposter syndrome.