Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Literary Value

Beginning with its central insight--that the life of literature is in fact a double life, a life shared between two relatively distinct domains of value, ＂strong＂ and ＂weak＂--Literature’s Social Lives unfolds across five chapters offering ever--deepening insights at every point.

Literature’s Social Lives situates itself within an emerging field of a sociologically attuned literary criticism, which combines ethnographic interest in the aesthetics of literary experience with a curiosity about how literature gains cultural relevance and institutional authority. In this groundbreaking study, Günter Leypoldt argues that ever-rising turnover of books between 1800 and 2000 expanded the commercial literary marketplace, yet by inverse subsidy simultaneously stabilized literature’s market-sheltered support systems. Today’s spaces of high literary ambition seem beset not just by market bottom lines, but by scholastic corps effects emerging from the rise of academic patronage. He develops a critical lexicon that more closely mirrors the literary authority of critics and literary historians on the public square, showing how as readers they often participate in two value systems: one rooted in the everyday (where they behave as consumers suiting private purposes), the other in a sort of moral or charismatic economy that appeals to them from outside of their individual selves and purposive routines.

This is a book for every scholar of literature, or indeed of cultural production more broadly, many of whom will recognize themselves in these pages. It shows what some prominent accounts of the contemporary U.S. literary field crucially miss about literature in our time--that it continues to be a vehicle for aspiration toward ＂higher＂ values than economic or utilitarian ones. The book builds its argument through sociohistorical research, and through case studies from nineteenth-century poets and journalist-writers (Wordsworth, Scott, Hawthorne, Henry James, among others) through to the modernists in 1920s’ London and New York and the post45 shift towards academic patronage (Barth, Toni Morrison, and the American Dirt debate, among others).

Günter Leypoldt is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg, and founding member of the Research Training Group ＂Authority and Trust in the US.＂ Previously he taught at the universities of Mainz and Tübingen, and held visiting appointments at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, Dartmouth College, and the ENS Lyon. His essays appeared in such journals as American Literary History, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, New Literary History, Poetics, Modern Language Quarterly, Critical Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and Post45.