Notes
N O T E S I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 See Tompkins, Sensational Designs. This study is surely one of the key analyses of the last twenty-five years, and its influence has been decisive insofar as so many Americanists have followed its basic wisdom of testing how novels register, codify, and negotiate cultural meanings and values, what Tompkins calls ‘‘cultural work.’’ Other books key to my study are Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books, which takes up some similar subjects but which develops a very di√erent value for reading, one closer to absorption rather than re-creation or civic activity. I have also learned from Joan Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture, which to my mind misses the class interests of her subject. I am grateful for David Minter’s A Cultural History of the American Novel, which in a sense provided an outline of what I then no longer needed to do in my study. Much later did I find Rita Barnard’s useful, evocative essay, ‘‘Modern American Fiction,’’ and, even later, Peter Stonely and Cindy Weinstein ’s A Concise Companion to American Fiction. 2 Along with the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, I have bene- fited from several important recovery e√orts that have been concluded during the course of writing this book, especially Deborah Lindsay Williams’s Not in Sisterhood and, more recently, Jamie Harker’s America the Middlebrow, which relates modern American women writers to their nineteenth-century counterparts instead of the Howellsian tradition in which, I argue, they participate. 3 On the historical question of reading, there were a plethora of periodical articles on the changing importance and function of reading in the era following World War I, some of which related the changes to the rise of college-educated readers. See, e.g., Maurice, ‘‘A New Golden Age in American Reading,’’ and Dana, ‘‘Changes in Reading .’’ My discussion of middle-class culture is indebted to Pierre Bourdieu’s works of social analysis, esp. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, esp. 292– 94, and The Field of Cultural Production, esp. 161–75, though I have tried to be mindful that few analogies to the twentieth-century shaping of the American mid- { 348 } NOTES TO PAGES 12–25 dle class strictly apply. Rather than attempt here to answer the predictable, though perhaps impossible, question of what exactly do we mean when we say ‘‘middle class,’’ I want to challenge the idea that the literature it produces is negligible by definition, even if its governing sensibility scarcely needs—some would say does not deserve—the nurturance that the academy a√ords. The antibourgeois prejudice was reinforced by the succession of methodologies and critical ideologies shaping American literary history, first, through the mastery of New Critical tenets, later through deconstruction, then through the new pluralism, and now through transnationalist vision. Actually, the lessons learned from gender and race revisionists have frequently guided me through this reconsideration of class-based values of reading. My book thus owes a substantial debt particularly to Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction. 4 See esp. Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy, and Shumway, Creating American Civilization. 5 Several recent books have made middle-class culture their object of inquiry, especially Sherry Ortner’s work in social anthropology, New Jersey Dreaming. Also see Moskowitz, Standard of Living, and Bledstein and Johnston, The Middling Sort. 6 Canby, ‘‘Literature in Contemporary America.’’ 7 Canby, ‘‘The Bourgeois American,’’ Everyday Americans, 175–83, esp. 165. 8 Ibid. Canby continues that the key factor in these changes was the ‘‘rise to intellectual influence and cultural and social power of aliens . . . most of all Jews—[who], unlike the earlier immigrant, do not cherish as their chief wish the desire to become in every sense American.’’ The arrival of such groups has resulted in a ‘‘new America’’—‘‘heterogeneous, brilliant, useful, but disturbing’’—that has ‘‘made us sensible of . . . the new alignments inevitable for the future.’’ American critics must count on the ‘‘cosmopolitans of brains and ability among us’’ and not bend to nativist clamor, as Canby describes the challenges to self-consciousness that the changing demography poses for national literature. 9 Sherman, The Genius of America, 226. 10 Canby, Education by Violence, 84–85. 11 Studies in the relation between the middle class and modernism include Catherine Turner’s Marketing Modernism. 12 On the question of standardizing American...
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