Literature in the Making: A History of U.S. Literary Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century [Paperback]

Using the U.S. as a case study,Literature in the Makingexamines 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 the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts.Literature in the Makingexamines what happened in between: how literature came to be more precisely specified and valued; how it was organized into genres, canons, and national traditions; and how it became the basis for departments of modern languages and literatures in research universities.Modern literature, the version of literature familiar today, was an international invention, but it was forged when literary cultures, traditions, and publishing industries were mainly organized nationally.Literature in the Makingexamines modern literature's coalescence and institutionalization in the United States, considered as an instructive instance of a phenomenon that was going global. Since modern literature initially offered a way to formulate the value of legacy texts by authors such as Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, however, the development of literature and literary culture in the U.S. was fundamentally transnational.Literature in the Makingargues that Shakespeare studies, one of the richest tracts of nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture, was a key domain in which literature came to be valued both for fuelling modern projects and for safeguarding values and practices that modernity put at risk-a foundational paradox that continues to shape literlcÖ