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.

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A Companion to 19th-Century America is an authoritative overview of current historiographical developments and major themes in the history of nineteenth-century America. Twenty-seven scholars, all specialists in their own thematic areas, examine the key debates and historiography. A thematic and chronological organization brings together the major time periods, politics, the Civil War, economy, and social and cultural history of the nineteenth century. Written with the general reader in mind, each essay surveys the historical research, the emerging concerns, and assesses the future direction of scholarship. Complete coverage of all the major themes and current debates in nineteenth-century US history assessing the state of the scholarship and future concerns. 24 original essays by leading experts in nineteenth-century American history complete with up-to-date bibliographies. Chronological and thematic organization covers both traditional and contemporary fields of research - politics, periods, economy, class formation, ethnicity, gender roles, regions, culture and ideas.