Word: bookings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Some people could say the subjects of the different entries aren’t all literary subjects, but the exploration of them is literary,” says reviewer Laura Miller, book editor for Salon.com. “It’s really an exploration of American culture, and American literary culture isn’t separable from pop culture, or visual, material, political, racial culture...
...attempt to aspire to the seriousness of European heritage. “Only focusing on Longfellow, Whitman, Fitzgerald, and the litany of familiar figures is to me ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ approach,” Miller says. “I feel that this book is more of a ‘Yankee Doodle’ approach, a book that people really care about and engage with, than it is an attempt to set up a kind of aspirational highbrow idea of culture. They write about culture people actually had rather than culture we think...
Miller is more skeptical. “The authors are people who are trying to write for a more general audience, but that audience spans the illiterate to the incredibly erudite. I don’t think the book is only for scholars…But it’s hard for me to judge what an average ignorant person finds hard to understand,” she says. “Some Americans are so ignorant it’s hard to say what the general reader is. The average American these days doesn’t even read...
...though the book is often touted as what will be this year’s most popular holiday present, it is, admittedly, an expensive gift for the average American—even an intelligent one. Another reviewer, Scott Kaufman, Professor of English at University of California, Irvine, urges other academics to pursue the approachable prose that is, for the most part, proffered by “Literary History.” Yet he, among others, has described its relatively hefty price as “prohibitive,” calling into question its ability to be accessible...
...sure that the sales of the book will especially be to libraries of various sorts, and most of all to college and university libraries, because that’s basically the biggest single customer base for big doorstop reference works of this kind,” says Lawrence Buell, Professor of American Literature, who contributed an entry on Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement. Citing the price as an investment the individual customer would not perhaps make, he explains, “I’m not trying to sound critical of what the book’s attempting here...