Nancy Glazener, whose previous book Reading for Realism was an important study of the reception of realist genres, has produced another fine work chronicling ways in which the category of “literature” came to be institutionalized during the late nineteenth century. Her argument is that literary studies at this time was inextricably involved with a wider general public, and that the formulation of academic expertise towards the end of the century tended to deter the enthusiasm of a much wider public. Like Lawrence Levine in his influential study Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), Glazener describes how Shakespeare, for example, became effectively quarantined by academic interests after his first textual editors appeared in Cambridge, England, during the 1860s. Rejecting such elitism, Glazener maintains that literary studies has been “from the outset disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and antidisciplinary” (195), and therefore she suggests that “the Internet's challenge to the authority of experts and its potential to renew the collaboration between academic and lay readers” (9) effectively takes English studies back to the state it was in during the latter years of the nineteenth century, which she describes as the “golden age of informal adult education in the United States” (93).

There were parts of Glazener's argument that I found entirely convincing, in particular her contention that the professionalization of literary studies has tended to downplay the significance of performance, rhetoric and drama, all of which had previously been central to ways in which the subject had been understood. She cites Edith Wharton's anecdote about Henry James reciting an Emily Brontë poem in “his rich and flexible voice” (147), with Glazener making the pertinent point that the rise of textual scholarship facilitated “the strict management of emotional engagement within literary studies” (195). However, her manifestly presentist argument does tend to overlook the positive contributions that academic professionalism also made to the field of literature. Glazener cites William James's well-known derogatory comments on the “Ph.D. octopus” (215), and she uses this to argue for more attention to composition classes and public engagement, while railing against “the polarizing effects of Theory” (217). All of this may be fair enough on its own terms, but one thing perhaps missing here is a wider consideration of how literary professionalization ran alongside a similar systematization of other academic fields around the turn of the twentieth century. There is a brief reference to biochemistry (192), but Franz Boas and his acolytes, for example, also helped simultaneously to introduce a new rigour into the study of anthropology, something that helped to organize the production of knowledge in a way that the more self-indulgent, genteel aspects of nineteenth-century museum culture had been quite unable to do.

The other area where Glazener's thesis seemed on uncertain ground was in its attempt to use the “long nineteenth century” as symptomatic of the relation between literature and a reading public more generally. “My working assumption,” she states in the first chapter, “is that the history of literature in the United States has much in common with the history of literature in the rest of the world” (11), and that “the United States is as good a site as any for examining how literature as we know it cohered” (10). This seems, to say the least, a doubtful hypothesis; surely if Glazener had turned her attention instead to the courts of Renaissance England, or to the commercial pressures informing eighteenth-century Grub Street, she would have come up with very different answers. Nevertheless, this book is very well informed on the specific terrain that it does cover, the nineteenth-century United States, and indeed I would see this as a book that is more helpful on the specifics of material culture in Victorian America than on the fraught question of how literature relates to the public sphere more generally. In relation to American literature, Glazener usefully demystifies the traditional romanticism that has long tended to partition literature from other aspects of the cultural world, with her insistence instead on understanding literature as “a collective invention and an institution” (3) working as a counterbalance to the customary normalization of Transcendentalist forms. Glazener's work also functions as an important corrective to earlier treatments by critics such as Kermit Vanderbilt, which tended to describe the formation of English studies purely in terms of its growth within the academy. Impressive both in the range of material it covers and its skilful relation of literature to a broader civic framework, Literature in the Making makes an important contribution to our understanding of what Glazener calls the “variegated” (148) nature of nineteenth-century literary culture as it manifested itself within the public domain.