My first taste of research into the world of popular culture was, in a small way, an act of defiance. During the course of an undergraduate lecture offering advice on dissertation topics, I was advised against exploring texts and writers I found enjoyable. There was a danger, or so the advice went, that to focus on such works—which in my case meant light, apparently frivolous, comic fiction—would be to sacrifice critical distance and impede meaningful analysis. Feeling instinctively that it’s no bad thing to pair critical work with affection, however, I chose to embark upon a love affair with P.G. Wodehouse, who remains one of the central figures of the doctoral work I’m conducting today. Through Wodehouse, and in particular through the excellent collection Middlebrow Wodehouse: P.G. Wodehouse’s Work in Context (2016), I was then introduced to the world of popular middlebrow studies, which has given shape and meaning to an instinctive feeling that good scholarship need not shy away from joy and frivolity.
My contribution to scholarship on the subject of the middlebrow is, in fact, constellated around its ‘delight, pleasure, and charm’ (Brown, 2013) as a key means of discussing satire in middlebrow texts. Discovering that the pleasant aspects of these texts are sometimes inseparable from their satirical transgressions, and that the middlebrow works I study are equally dependent on both, has allowed me to explore issues with real weight and substance. In particular, my research is animated by an exploration of past and ongoing bigotry and prejudice across my subjects’ works; a bigotry which is expressed through the censorious mockery characteristic of satire, but endowed with persuasive power through the ostensible harmlessness of middlebrow charm.
The high stakes implicit in this line of thought are only exacerbated by the understanding, in the study of popular fiction, that the experience of the ordinary reader matters. The prospect of a substantial and efficacious capacity for influencing readers—a crucial component of my work—is best realised by embracing the study of popular culture. My research is, in short, enhanced through the wonderful combination of political urgency and enjoyment that my popular subjects represent, allowing me to feel that my work has real significance while offering up pleasure as both a natural consequence of reading the works involved and a legitimate basis for academic enquiry.
Of course, my experiences represent only a tiny facet of the many-sided, multidisciplinary world of popular culture in its many weird and wonderful forms. As a Network, we look forward to providing a space for a large variety of researchers, undertaking a large variety of research, to meet, network, and share ideas. But my hope is that all of us will be able to bring to the table a variant of those aspects of scholarship that I treasure most highly: a combination of political urgency, with its concomitant implication that the ideas we share have significance and meaning, and—above all—a sense of the delight, pleasure, and charm which have increasingly come to define my time as a doctoral researcher. I hope that these qualities can be found, not only in our individual work, but in the communities and collaboration that this Network will seek to promote.
Written by Daniel Buckingham