Literature in the Making

<p>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. <em>Literature</em> <em>in the Making</em> examines 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.</p><p>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. <em>Literature in the Making</em> examines 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. <em>Literature in the Making</em> argues 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 literary studies and literary culture.</p><p>Bringing together the histories of literature's competing conceptualizations its print infrastructure its changing status in higher education and its life in public culture during the long nineteenth century <em>Literature in the Making</em> offers a robust account of how and why literature mattered then and matters now. By highlighting the lively collaboration between academics and non-academics that prevailed before the ascendancy of the research university starkly divided experts from amateurs <em>Literature in the Making</em> also opens new possibilities for envisioning how academics might partner with the reading public.</p>