Abstract
The term literature began to consolidate its modern meaning around 1830, just as print culture was becoming immensely more powerful.1 Ever since that time, the novel has taken up more and more space within literature, but since the early twentieth century, literature has become increasingly less important within culture as a whole, as new media, including film, radio, television and the e-world have rapidly emerged and risen to dominance.2
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Notes and reference
See R. Williams (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 183–8.
See J. Arac (2009) ‘What Kind of History Does a Theory of the Novel Require?’, Novel XLII, 2, 190–5.
See H. Levin (1963) ‘Literature as an Institution’, in The Gates of Horn (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 16–23.
See J. Arac (1989) Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 23–31,
and E. W. Said (1975) Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books), pp. 224–61.
See Raymond Williams (1980) ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in Problems of Materialism and Culture (London: New Left Books), pp. 31–49.
See K. Trumpener (2006) ‘World Music, World Literature’, in H. Saussy (ed.) Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), esp. p. 189.
See F. Moretti (2000) ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review n.s. 1, 54–68;
and J. Arac (2002) ‘Anglo-Globalism?’, New Left Review n.s. 16, 35–45.
P. Casanova (2004) The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press),
and J. Arac (2008a) ‘Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age’, New Literary History, XXXIX, 751–4.
See J. Arac (2010) ‘The Media of Sublimity, Johnson and Lamb on King Lear’, in Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (New York: Fordham University Press), pp. 24–33.
S. Johnson (2006) The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. R. Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press), vol. 1, p. 290.
In his dictionary, it is defined as ‘learning; skill in letters’. S. Johnson (1979) Dictionary of the English Language, facsimile edn (London: Times Books).
See Arac (2008a), pp. 755–6; S. Hoesel-Uhlig (2004) ‘Changing fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur’, in C. Prendergast (ed.) Debating World Literature (London: Verso), pp. 26–53;
and P. Cheah (2008) ‘What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity’, Daedalus, CXXXVII, 3, 26–38.
V. Woolf (2005) A Room of One’s Own, ed. S. Gubar (Orlando, FL: Harcourt), pp. 56 and 67.
V. Hugo (1959) Notre Dame de Paris: 1482, ed. M.-F. Guyard (Paris: Garnier), pp. 207, 209–24.
G. Lukács (1963) The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press), esp. pp. 81–5 (emphasising Balzac).
H. James (1984a) ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Essays: American and English Writers, ed. L. Edel (New York: Library of America), p. 58.
See also H. James (1984b) ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, in Literary Criticism: European Writers and the Prefaces, ed. L. Edel (New York: Library of America), pp. 115–39.
F. O. Matthiessen (1941) American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press).
J. Arac (2005) The Emergence of American Literary Narrative: 1820–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
G. Marcus (2006) The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), esp. p. 58.
See J. Arac (1999) ‘Why Does No One Care about the Aesthetic Value of Huckleberry Finn?’, New Literary History, XXX, 773.
See J. Arac (1986) ‘The Politics of The Scarlet Letter’, in S. Bercovitch and M. Jehlen (eds) Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 247–66.
See J. Arac (2008b) ‘Afterword’, in H. B. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: New American Library), pp. 509–18.
See F. Moretti (1996) Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso), p. 61.
See J. Arac (2011) ‘The Age of the Novel, the Age of Empire: Howells, Twain, James around 1900’, Yearbook of English Studies, XLI, 2, 94–105.
See F. L. Mott (1938) History of American Magazines, 3 vols., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), esp. vol. 2, pp. 383–405, 493–515; vol. 3, pp. 457–80. Mott subsequently published two further volumes extending the coverage from 1885 to 1925.
See also N. Glazener (1997) Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
See J. Arac (2007) ‘Babel and Vernacular in an Empire of Immigrants: Howells and the Languages of American Fiction’, boundary 2, XXXIV, 2, 1–20.
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Arac, J. (2014). Defining an ‘Age of the Novel’ in the United States. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (eds) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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