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7 - Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
Nancy Glazener
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
Nancy Glazener
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Over the past two centuries, the idea of literature has carried a lot of clout. Writers’ desires and ambitions have taken shape in relation to literature: writers who longed to be literary, did not care about being literary, or thumbed their noses at literature were all affected by it. Readers have quarreled about which works and authors were truly literary. Moreover, in the USA and many other nations, understandings of literature were institutionalized within the publishing industry and in secondary and higher education, and these institutional practices remained influential even when the terms of literary value began to be called into question. The most famous controversies about literary value were the late twentieth-century canon wars, which increased the number and range of writings valued in teaching and scholarship, but these controversies did not really expand the literary canon: they dissolved it. In place of a distinction between literary writings that are important to teach and study and subliterary or nonliterary writings that are not, most academics whose field of study is still institutionally identified as “literature” care about a wide variety of writings and print texts, including but not limited to traditional literary genres such as novels and poetry.

Precisely because a strictly bounded conception of “literature” no longer adequately captures the ways in which serious readers value old and new works, we are now in a position to take stock of literature as a cultural phenomenon.

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The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 139 - 164
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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