IN THE COMPANY OF BOOKS Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America

A vital feature of American culture in the nineteenth century was the growing awareness that the literary marketplace consisted not of a single, unified, relatively homogeneous reading public but rather of many disparate, overlapping reading communities differentiated by interests, class, and level of education as well as by gender and stage of life. Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America, author Sarah Wadsworth analyzes the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself. 2006 paperback, 280 pages.