Loving Literature: A Cultural History - Hardcover

Lynch, Deidre Shauna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022618370X ISBN 13: 9780226183701

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don’t love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they?

That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history.

While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase “the love of literature” as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, “It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities.” With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.

About this title

About the Author:

Deidre Shauna Lynch is professor of English at Harvard University and the Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review:

"A groundbreaking examination of literary affections. Coming at a moment when the field of literary studies is in crisis, in danger of losing its legitimacy, this account of our emotional commitment to books is especially important. . . . At every point, the author’s own scholarly acumen and love of literature are clearly on display. She demonstrates, even as she reasons, that professional literary scholars can dispassionately and critically analyse the texts they love and intimately experience.” (Times Higher Education)

"Reading Loving Literature, I couldn’t help but see the romance that Lynch describes everywhere—from my local bookstore, where one can buy a tote bag with the likeness of Virginia Woolf or George Orwell, to the inevitable instances in which dead writers betray their present-day devotees." (Joshua Rothman New Yorker)

“An enthralling account of the complex relationship between reading and feeling. . . . By the end of Deidre Shauna Lynch’s wonderful study, one is left less with a definitive sense of ‘why’ we love literature (let alone why we should or shouldn’t) than with these long-lasting flashes of illumination. They are what make this book easy to love, like the best kind of literary history.” (Times Literary Supplement)

“One welcome feature of Lynch’s book is that it highlights the ways in which our feelings about literature can inform intellectual choices that are typically justified on epistemological grounds.”
(Chronicle of Higher Education)

“[Lynch’s] investigation into the way late-18th- and early 19th-century readers felt and expressed their love of books is beautifully focused. . . . Like so many great arguments—Said’s on Orientalism, Anderson’s on the Nation, Butler’s on Performativity—, Lynch’s argument will be loved because it speaks both to and for us, of things we already knew but in terms that are historically astute.”
(Los Angeles Review of Books)

“A wide-ranging study. . . . The book is strongest in its detailed examination of understudied figures . . . and its sensitivity to the social forces that shape reader responses. . . . Advanced scholars will benefit from Lynch’s unknotting of intertwined public and private histories of earlier readers and scholars—a subject of relevance in the current climate, in which it seems increasingly untenable to make one’s living by loving literature. Highly recommended.”
(Choice)

“The book takes a quick first step, to the idea that perhaps reinstating an explicit, committed, but thoughtful love of literature would inspire those involved, and communicate the necessity of the subject better. Rather than pausing on this, however, it then moves on to its real issue: that loving literature is not, and has never been, a simple or unifying thing. The subsequent exploration, of the love of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is consistently engaging and insightful. The indirect approach to criticism’s modern predicament proves rewarding.”
(Cambridge Quarterly)

“Readers’ intimate, often perverse, relations with books are given magisterial treatment. . . . On the one hand, Loving Literature is on the leading edge of research into book history, antiquarianism, canon formation, and reading practice. On the other, it is also deeply situated in the study of affect, attachment, gender, sexuality, perversion, and mourning. . . . Puts forward a whole new set of concerns and a whole new cast of characters for telling the story of what we do.”
(SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900)

“Loving Literature is a fascinating cultural history. . . . The writing is forceful, witty, and often breezy in a way that suggests the author's tremendous mastery over and comfort with the material. The book is an important corrective to the many scholarly books in recent years that have ignored the importance of affect in the history of literary studies.” (New Books on Literature 19)

“Wonderfully engaging. . . . This book ranges widely over an astounding amount of material but without dropping the thread of its carefully plotted argument. At the same time, Lynch’s terrific eye for the curious, humorous but revelatory detail—a zany, giveaway turn of phrase in an author’s writing, say—is one source of this study’s bookish pleasures: such enlivening details testify to the attentive, affectionate, but skeptical reading she models.” (European Romantic Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 022618370X
• ISBN 13: 9780226183701
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352