Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.

div What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics. /DIV

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

Challenging the conventional understandings of literary naturalism defined primarily through its male writers, Donna M. Campbell examines the ways in which American women writers wrote naturalistic fiction and redefined its principles for their own purposes. Bitter Tastes looks at examples from Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and others and positions their work within the naturalistic canon that arose near the turn of the twentieth century. Campbell further places these women writers in a broader context by tracing their relationship to early film, which, like naturalism, claimed the ability to represent elemental social truths through a documentary method. Women had a significant presence in early film and constituted 40 percent of scenario writers--in many cases they also served as directors and producers. Campbell explores the features of naturalism that assumed special prominence in women's writing and early film and how the work of these early naturalists diverged from that of their male counterparts in important ways.

Reproduction of the original: Literary Taste: How to Form It by Arnold Bennett

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Fiction. Art. Travel. California Interest. Food Studies. A delectable, nearly edible collection of literary poetry, fiction, and nonfiction about wine, cheese and chocolate, laced with full-color art and photography that will stimulate the taste buds. The collection features writers and artists from 20 states, with many California wine country writers and artists showcased. Contributing writers: Blanche Abrams, Michael Ackley, David Anderson, Donald R. Anderson, Scott Thomas Anderson, Kevin Arnold, Claire J. Baker, Regina Murray Brault, Jessica M. Brophy, Ed Cline, J. Marie Clough, Annette Corth, Brad Crenshaw, Barbara Crooker, Chrissy Davis, Deborah H. Doolittle, Michael Duffett, Pamela Dunn, Elaine Faber, Linda Field, Maureen Tolman Flannery, Gretchen Fletcher, Gail Folkins, Cynthia Gallaher, Susan Gardner, June Comarsh Gillam, Nancy Aidé González, Dianna Henning, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Wahna J. Inks, Kathie Isaac-Luke, Janet Jennings, Sally Kaplan, William Keener, Denella Kimura, Judy Lea Koretsky, Jim Lanier, W.F. Lantry, Barbara Leon, Sunny Lockwood, Calder Lowe, Nan Mahon, M.J. Mallery, Antoinette May, Anne McCrady, Jerred Metz, Bonnie Miller, Sharon Lask Munson, Carol Osterlund, Jan B. Parker, Mary Elizabeth Parker, Ron Pickup, Susanna Rich, AJ Roberts, Monika Rose, Marie J. Ross, S.L. Schultz, Ann Roberts Seely, Paul Sohar, Pru Starr, Mary Langer Thompson, Linda Toren, Glenn Wasson, Pat Phillips West, Daniel Williams, Joy Willow, Steve Wilson, and Scott V. Young. Contributing artists and photographers: Jan Alcalde, Kevin Arnold, Abigail Barnes, Kevin Brady, Ty Childress, Carol L. Clark, Ed Cline, Shirley Craine, Joyce Dedini, Brent Duffin, Kathy Boyd Fellure, Linda Field, T.B. "Boo" Heisey, Marilyn Hinsdale, Susie Hoffman, Wahna J. Inks, Denella Kimura, Ann Nancy Macomber, Shanda McGrew, Bonnie Miller, Ruth Morrow, Keith Munson, Brenda Nasser, Elizabeth Parrish, Blaise Pegasus, Ron Pickup, Cari Weber Povenz, Amy Raupach, Monika Rose, Dino L. Rovera, Maren Sampson, Connie Strawbridge, Barbara Wells, Kathleen Wolf, and Robert Yeager.

Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual life of the country. In this eloquent book, Adam Kirsch shows that Trilling, far from being obsolete, is essential to understanding our current crisis of literary confidence--and to overcoming it.By reading Trilling primarily as a writer and thinker, Kirsch demonstrates how Trilling's original and moving work continues to provide an inspiring example of a mind creating itself through its encounters with texts. "Why Trilling Matters" introduces all of Trilling's major writings and situates him in the intellectual landscape of his century, from Communism in the 1930s to neoconservatism in the 1970s. But Kirsch goes deeper, addressing today's concerns about the decline of literature, reading, and even the book itself, and finds that Trilling has more to teach us now than ever before. As Kirsch writes, "Trilling's essays are not exactly literary criticism" but, like all literature, "ends in themselves."