Reading up
Subtitle: middle-class readers and the culture of success in the early twentieth-century United States
By: Amy L. Blair
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9781439906682; 9781439906675
Subjects: Popular literature; Literature and society; History and criticism; American literature; Books and reading; Appreciation; Middle class; History
Description: "A person who reads a book for self-improvement rather than aesthetic pleasure is 'reading up.' Reading Up is Amy Blair's engaging study of popular literary critics who promoted reading generally and specific books as vehicles for acquiring cultural competence and economic mobility. Combining methodologies from the history of the book and the history of reading, to mass-cultural studies, reader-response criticism, reception studies, and formalist literary analysis, Blair shows how such critics influenced the choices of striving readers and popularized some elite writers. Framed by an analysis of Hamilton Wright Mabie's role promoting the concept of reading up during his ten-year stint as the cultivator of literary taste for the highly popular Ladies' Home Journal, Reading Up reveals how readers flocked to literary works they would be expected to dislike. Blair shows that while readers could be led to certain books by a trusted adviser, they frequently followed their own path in interpreting them in unexpected ways"--Amazon.com.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-240) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Cultivating taste in a mass-market world; title: Mr. Mabie tells what to read; title: The compromise of Silas Lapham; title: James for the general reader; title: Misreading The house of mirth; title: The comforts of romanticism; title: Epilogue: Reading up into the twenty-first century; title: Appendix A: The Mabie canon; title: Appendix B: "Novels descriptive of American life" (November 1908).