The scope of Nancy Bentley's study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature is certainly ambitious. Seeking to reconfigure our understanding of a (perhaps the) crucial artistic tension of the period – that between high and low culture – this study ranges across some familiar touchstones of American literary studies (James, Howells, Wharton) as well as lesser-known figures (Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Bonnin), and also seeks to conceive of the literary itself in a way that allows room for discussion of Henry Adams, William James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. As this roll call suggests, Bentley's attentions are not just on how the traditional stalwarts of high literary culture viewed the ubiquity of a “mass-mediated imaginary” with contempt and hostility, but how the “encounter between literary culture and postliterary publicity” transformed literary culture's understanding of its place within the wider public sphere. It makes for a fascinating book.

Moving from an opening chapter on Howells and James and their relation to the changing notion of the “museum” during the period (from an eclectic collection of novelties to a refined pantheon of authorized culture), Bentley proceeds to map a broad landscape of literary and intellectual life, from the claims and contradictions of self-conscious realism, through Native American intellectuals and black bohemia, to the transatlantic “Americanization” of culture and scientific notions of human subjectivity. On the other side of the divide, “mass culture” becomes the collective name for a dazzling array of forms: the media and popular print culture, ethnological displays, staged train wrecks, early cinema, urban life, amusement parks, even the delights and dangers of international travel. While this array of material is impressively researched, and leads to some moments of brilliant analysis, there can also be a creeping sense of self-affirming logic at work. When Bentley states that the focus of her analysis will be the “more open and incisive thinkers” of the period, she effectively means those high literary writers who saw themselves in opposition to mass culture to begin with. Conceived as such, the central relationship here between literary and mass culture will always appear oppositional or, at the very least, separate. But what about the place where those two worlds overlap? Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1880), for instance, was by far the best-selling novel of the age (and perhaps even the century) – surely an example of how the advances of consumer capitalism meant that literature became a form of “mass” experience as much as any amusement park or Wild West show. It would have been interesting to see Bentley complicate her organizing schema by thinking about the place of a literary product like the dime novel in the dialogue between the high and low arenas of artistic expression.

These reservations should not detract from what is a significant accomplishment, however. Richly contextualized and intellectually sophisticated, Frantic Panoramas is an important addition to the scholarship on post-Civil War American literature and should initiate further work on the intimate and intricate connections between American literature and other cultural expressions – wherever they sat in the artistic hierarchy – that competed for the public's attention.