"This well-researched, thoughtful book adds substantially to our understanding of middlebrow culture. It also has much to teach us about the complexities and variabilities of reading as a social practice. Beautifully written and intellectually deft, Reading Up will interest everyone engaged in the study of American literature and its relationship the larger culture."
—Janice Radway, Communication Studies, Northwestern University, and author of A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire
Amy L. Blair is an Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cultivating Taste in a Mass-Market World
1 Mr. Mabie Tells What to Read
2 The Compromise of Silas Lapham
3 James for the General Reader
4 Misreading The House of Mirth
5 The Comforts of Romanticism
Epilogue: Reading Up into the Twenty-first Century
Appendix A: The Mabie Canon
Appendix B: “Novels Descriptive of American Life” (November 1908)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
![Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States [Hardcover]](/itemImage/2/2/8/8/2_5370888.jpg "Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States [Hardcover]")