First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: Popular fiction follows literature professors wherever they go. At coffee shops or out for drinks, after faculty meetings or classes, even at family reunions – they are persistently pressed to talk about bestselling novels. Questions immediately follow: What do I mean when I say a book is "good"? Why do contemporary novels like these, conversations like these, matter to professors of literature? Shouldn't they be spending their time re-reading The Great Gatsby? The Ulysses Delusion confronts these questions and answers their call for more engaged conversations about books...read more

The lab manual includes 19 exercises, six study aids, and 28 experiments. The entire book has been updated and revised to reflect the most current terminology and environmental standards. Six new labs have been added as well as exercises and projects that require computer graphing and the web.

Product Description: During the Cold War, many popular American novels were labelled "middlebrow," leading to a general belief that these texts held less intellectual merit. Perrin debunks these unfair assumptions through works by James Michener, Harper Lee, and Leon Uris, arguing that such writers made a major contribution to the tradition of American literature...read more

Product Description: Based on extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials, Unbuttoning America explains how a real-life patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a bestselling novel, a film, and a television series...read more

Product Description: What is it about certain books that makes them bestsellers? Why do some of these books remain popular for centuries, and others fade gently into obscurity? And why is it that when scholars do turn their attention to bestsellers, they seem only to be interested in the same handful of blockbusters, when so many books that were once immensely popular remain under-examined? Addressing those and other equally pressing questions about popular literature, Must Read is the first scholarly collection to offer both a survey of the evolution of American bestsellers as well as critical readings of some of the key texts that have shaped the American imagination since the nation's founding...read more

Product Description: DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF WHAT MAKES A MEGA-BESTSELLER IN THIS ENTERTAINING, REVELATORY GUIDE  What do Michael Corleone, Jack Ryan, and Scout Finch have in common? Creative writing professor and thriller writer James W. Hall knows. Now, in this entertaining, revelatory book, he reveals how bestsellers work, using twelve twentieth-century blockbusters as case studies—including The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jaws...read more

A person who reads a book for self-improvement rather than aesthetic pleasure is OC reading up.OCOa"Reading Up"ais Amy Blair's engaging study of popular literary critics who promoted reading generally and specific books as vehicles for acquiring cultural competence and economic mobility. Combining methodologies from the history of the book and the history of reading, to mass-cultural studies, reader-response criticism, reception studies, and formalist literary analysis, Blair shows how such critics influenced the choices of striving readers and popularized some elite writers.Framed by an analysis of Hamilton Wright Mabie's role promoting the concept of OC reading upOCO during his ten-year stint as the cultivator of literary taste for the highly populara"Ladies' Home Journal," a"Reading Up"areveals how readers flocked to literary works that they would be expected to dislike. Blair shows that while readers could be led to certain books by a trusted adviser, they frequently followed their own path in interpreting them in unexpected ways.

Product Description: The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance...read more

Product Description: Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere...read more

Product Description: The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance examines the response of American leftist writers of the 1930s to the rise of mass culture, and to the continued propagation of the values of consumerism during the Depression. Rita Barnard traces in the work of Kenneth Fearing and Nathanael West theoretical positions associated with the Frankfurt School (especially Walter Benjamin) and with contemporary theorists of postmodernism...read more

Product Description: In 1787, Benjamin Rush cautioned that public punishments were dangerous to the social and legal authority of the new nation. For Rush, irrepressible human sentiments all but guaranteed that public punishments would turn spectators against the institutions responsible for the punishments...read more

Product Description: Frequently identified as sensational literature filled with violent characters, intricately woven plots, changing identities and confusion between issues of right and wrong, many considered the Dime Novel guilty of sending serious and improper messages to the day's impressionable youth...read more

Product Description: Here is an affectionate look back at the outsized heroes who once occupied the imagination of millions of loyal readers. The Shadow. Tarzan. Doc Savage. Captain Future. The Spider. Zorro. They were the original super guys-godfathers and inspiration to the likes of Supewrman, Batman and James Bond...read more

Product Description: Critics often define the modernist period as the dichotomy between the high culture of edgy literary experimentation and the low culture of dime store novels, gritty detective stories, and other genre fiction, dismissing the significant group of American women writers who negotiated the delicate balance between critical and commercial success...read more

Product Description: The Trash Phenomenon looks at how writers of the late twentieth century not only have integrated the events, artifacts, and theories of popular culture into their works but also have used those works as windows into popular culture's role in the process of nation building...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Using the annual hardcover best seller lists from 'The Bookman' and then 'Publishers Weekly,' examines twentieth-century American social, cultural, and historical trends through the lens of popular literature. (view table of contents)

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