Using the U.S. as a case study, Literature in the Making examines the public life of literature between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century.
Using the U.S. as a case study, Literature in the Making examines the public life of literature between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, bringing together the development of literature's intellectual infrastructure, literature's operation in print culture, literature's changing status in higher education, and the surprisingly rich and interesting history of public literary culture.
In anatomizing how white, male, upper-class New Englanders succeeded in dominating literary production to naturalize taste for a Realism that proscribed categorical consideration of race, class, and gender, Glazener recovers a crucial chapter of literary history."--Kathryne Lindberg, Wayne State University
Reading for Realism presents a new approach to U.S. literary history that is based on the analysis of dominant reading practices rather than on the production of texts. Nancy Glazener’s focus is the realist novel, the most influential literary form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a form she contends was only made possible by changes in the expectations of readers about pleasure and literary value. By tracing readers’ collaboration in...
