The Midwest, The Middle Class, and Queerness in the Mid-Twentieth Century; MAASA Conference; Tulsa, OK; April 1-3, 2012
Literature and culture critics are beginning to realize that the study of literature and print culture suffers from an obsession with the urban and the avant-garde. There exist huge archives of print and literary artifacts which, forgotten by academia, may have much to reveal about American literary and print history. As some have argued, there may be great potential in constructing a literary and print history that includes the sort of widely circulated "middlebrow" works that were reliably consumed by the reading public. As a few have argued, this centeredness on urbanity is particularly a problem in queer studies, thus rendering rural and/or middlebrow queer literature and print culture rich with possibilities for recovery.