Description: This book draws from literary sociology to look at literature in a longue durée (from Romantic poetry to the Toni-Morrison novel). It proposes a new value theory, and sketches an institutional history of US and Anglophone literary culture from 1800 to the present. Its bifocal institutional and value-theoretical lens offers a fresh look at literary production, explaining the tension of vocation and trade regimes since 1800; the relevance of subsidies to authors of high literary ambition; the network-dependency of avant-gardes and identity groups; the institutional prerequisites of world-literary iconicity, and the diversification and ranking of reading cultures.
Review Quotes: "What do authors and critics do and why? Günter Leypoldt's brilliant and breathtakingly ambitious book is destined to become required reading. Even-tempered, judicious, and utterly persuasive, Literature's Social Lives is the best available account of the diverse forms of literary value." -- Rita Felski, University of Virginia
"I cannot imagine a single scholar of literature, or indeed of cultural production more broadly, who wouldn't profit greatly from reading this book. It makes so many important links across time, and clears up so many confusions about the status of literature in the present, it will revivify and advance conversations that have been moving in circles for too long." -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University"Literature's Social Lives is an extraordinary achievement, at once a re-thinking of the problem of how literary value is established, and an immensely learned history of literature as a social form. Leypoldt's account of literary value by means of a nuanced theory of "strong" and "weak" value systems operating in a constantly shifting social space will be an indispensable resource for scholars interested in where literature has been and where it is going." -- John David Guillory, New York University"[T]he most important contribution to the sociology of literature in a long time." -- Contextes