Throughout the twentieth century, as literary texts circulated through high-school and college classrooms, reading became a specialized skill. Especially with the dominance of the “new criticism” in the 1930s, literature acquired an autonomous life as “text,” demanding intensive “close reading” of its verbal complexity and formal coherence as an aesthetic object. Beginning in the 1970s, with the proliferation of programs devoted to African-American culture, gender studies, sexuality studies, and ethnic studies programs, the literary canon became more diverse. In the mid-1980s new historicism helped push aesthetic formalism further from the agenda of literary education in the university, promoting new interest in historical contexts even as psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and reader-response approaches continued to fetishize “textuality” as their primary object of inquiry. Whatever the vagaries of theory, method, and subdisciplinary turf battles through which scholars have wandered over the last few decades, we have remained in our professional practices of reading and teaching committed to a hermeneutics of interpretation. Even as scholars developed arguments about history or culture, the teaching and criticism of literature has continued to rely on the institutional and psychological isolation of reading, as an individual exercise in mastery of the text fostered by silence and solitude.

Drawing on the methods of cultural anthropology, sociology, and social history, as well as literary studies, scholars working in the crossdisciplinary history of the book over the last three decades have challenged concepts and methods that critics and historians alike have brought to the study of literature. The meanings of literature acquire historical lives in the material formats and contexts in which readers engage them. They acquire sensory presence, emotional implication, and cultural authority through the personal, social, and institutional uses to which they are put. Everyday Ideas, by Ronald and Mary Zboray, and Songs of Ourselves, by Joan Rubin, make ambitious contributions to this field, further extending the life of reading beyond the printed page. Situating the encounter with texts within broad and diverse contexts of social experience, both volumes promise to open new chapters in the teaching of American literature, offering historical vantage points from which to understand our own scholarly practices of interpretation within a spectrum of reading practices.

In the scale of its research, Everyday Ideas offers an unprecedented survey of the diversity of uses to which antebellum New Englanders put their literacy. It is based on the diaries and letters of some 931 antebellum New Englanders, whom the Zborays treat as “informants” reporting on their own socioliterary experience and “at least another five thousand subjects they observed” (xxi). Selecting instances from this prodigious archive, the book presents a descriptive inventory of activities related to the variety of ways that Americans used their skills of advanced literacy, organized into three parts as “production,” “dissemination,” and “consumption.” People created texts, in the form of diaries and letters, but also in copying or cutting up newspapers and books, transcribing lectures, crafting “mental editions” through memorization of verse and prose, prayers or hymns. They distributed texts by quoting, excerpting, or transcribing printed materials in letters, by bundling materials with newspapers or packets sent through the post office, by lending books or exchanging periodicals, by reciting or reading out loud, or by performing theatricals. And they received texts in a variety of ways, in their collective and individual responses to lectures, in caring for the physical artifact in which they were carried, “envisioning them as part of the dense social networks they coursed through or as implicated in literary socialization” (223). Compiling a regional profile of these activities, the book presents some marvelous vignettes, such as the courtship of New Hampshire painter John Burgum and Emma Gannell under the suspicious eye of her aunt. The couple takes to meeting on the banks of the Merrimack River every day, sometimes as early as five in the morning, when they would exchange books, newspapers, and scrapbooks. While documenting the presence of books and reading across myriad sectors of leisure and work, the Zborays make sensitive observations about the disruption of oral reading at sewing circles by sewing machines, for instance, as well as literary conversations among seamen, the efforts people made to get around post office regulations, home recipes for bookbinding, and many other features of the materiality of literacy.

Covering these activities with both remarkable breadth and exhausting detail, the Zborays return to two basic assertions. First, literature suffused all corners of ordinary life, expressing the creativity of “everyday poets and prose stylists” who—though “rarely, if ever, wielding the pen with a power that matched their idols”—“pushed to the limits the human capacity to appreciate and, ultimately, create literature” (68). Second, literary activities were instruments of sociability. “These readers fashioned ideas gleaned from literature into webs of local knowledge that were spun out through social ties. Insofar as ideas themselves became everyday, common social experience became literary” (xvii–xviii). Both claims depend for their significance on assumptions about, and reactions to, the perceived limits of traditional academic methods and objects of literary study. “Literature” consists not only of books by professional or published writers, and in applying this category to occasional writings and to more ephemeral activities of reading and listening and speaking, the Zborays argue for the importance and prevalence of imagination for ordinary New Englanders. In this regard, they ask us to care about the phenomena of the “everyday” because it is a locus of “ideas,” invested with creative ambition and self-conscious struggles for meaning that we normally attribute to formal intellectual history or canonical literary texts. “Ordinary folk produced original literature, too” (2), and their heads were often filled with ideas: “Although ideas contained in texts might stimulate thinking, often the artifact . . . could provoke fresh and complex thoughts” (150). Given their priority in describing “socioliterary experience” as revealed by their research into diaries and letters, the Zborays say relatively little about the broader implications of the antebellum period for larger narratives of American literature and culture. In an epilogue, however, they do argue that following the disruptions of the civil war, literary practices and values came to be institutionalized in new ways in the later nineteenth century. As a result of new patterns of bureaucratization, centralization, and mass production, New Englanders “found it was impossible to repair that delicate chain that had once so intimately linked human relations and literary meaning. Ideas would never be quite so everyday again” (294).

As Joan Shelley Rubin demonstrates in Songs of Ourselves, the social life of literature did not end with the Civil War. Like the Zborays, Rubin seeks to make the seemingly portentous category of Literature more egalitarian, offering “a more accurate as well as more democratic portrayal of American culture than we have previously possessed” (6). So, too, Rubin shares their objective to engage the social life of texts by connecting “the uses of literature to the untold chronicle of emotional life in America”—to tell, as she puts it, “a story of poetry as lived experience” (7). To do this, Rubin first establishes a typology for describing the image of “the Poet” as it evolved in modern American culture, sketching the reputations of Emerson, Longfellow, Whitman, Tennyson, and other major figures who, by their classic status or their notoriety, furnished the popular reading of poetry with its expressive dynamics and critical iconography through the mid-twentieth century. When Edna St Vincent Millay appeared at public readings in sexually suggestive dresses, “she was acting out a set of values” associated with bohemian excess and sophistication—an image that was “entangled with another construction of the poet,” aligned with girlish innocence and authenticity (60). So, too, Edgar Guest “constructed a ‘modern’ American figure of the poet by forging an amalgam of innocence and sophistication,” in his case suffused with sentimental verse celebrating the home and the male sociability of “the lodge affairs, club meetings, and golf games populated by the admen and industrialists who transacted the business of American consumer culture” (72).

While this focus on celebrity of authors makes for effective storytelling, it runs the risk of reductive or tautological interpretations. In allegorical fashion, individuals are taken to represent tensions, anxieties, and conflicts of “American culture,” their contribution of historical change already assumed within overly familiar narratives of postwar alienation, the birth of the new woman, and so on. In Rubin's analysis, however, the modern visibility of individual poets was crucial to the remarkably personal ways in which a mass audience received their work. Poets became “emblems of modernity” (73) through the same apparatus of consumer culture that made image—both as an ethos of self-actualization and as a feature of public relations and advertising campaigns—central to what Warren Susmann long ago termed the “culture of personality.” Discussing marketing strategies of publishers, correspondence, and reviews, Rubin demonstrates that—contrary to the disappearance of the Author from much literary theory and criticism—poetry remained viable as a consumer good, and meaningful to readers, because it was sold with contrapuntal attributes of authorial personality: Poet as seer or sage, as intimate or alien, cipher or celebrity. In this sense, the celebrity of particular poets became pivotal to how poetry was read in popular culture.

As Rubin demonstrates, the commercial dynamics of print culture made the experience of poetry available to audiences outside the classroom, “on terms that were antithetical to the sacralization of the genre” that was taking place in the academic study of literature. To begin with, poems and poets were not encountered within a “canon” of literature, designed to teach readers about changing styles of verse, moving through historical periods towards a purity of form, exemplified by the experimentation and oppositional stances of modernism. Instead, they were packaged in what Rubin terms “Memory Gem” anthologies designed for particular contexts of use: classroom reading and recitation, civic commemoration and Americanization classes, campfire and outdoor recreation, religious devotion and service, and especially “home reading.” Devoting a chapter to each of these contexts, Rubin argues for the existence of “multiple canons, made up of texts deemed ‘good’ because they conserved the values governing the conditions of their use.” In none of these contexts was the experience of poetry especially linked to the close reading of texts that, with new criticism, would become the dominant model of academic reading. To understand the history of poetry in America requires us to turn away from our own reading of literary texts within the university to the interpretation of reading itself as a historical practice: to the values, forms, rituals, and functions that made poetry meaningful within particular social spaces and cultural institutions.

Modern production of culture has, since the middle of the nineteenth century, been centralized and bureaucratized, primarily through the consolidation of networks of professional expertise as well as the development of national markets for leisure and entertainment—or what Theodor Adorno and other Frankfurt School critics termed “the culture industry.” But the social experience of culture is inescapably local, organized within multiple sites serving communal and individual ends, perpetuated by institutions with overlapping but distinct agendas. In the schoolroom, for example, the value of poetry was discovered not only through silent reflection on printed words, but through individual and group recitations staged in the course of the school week as well as at school holidays and commencement exercises. In both elementary and high schools, anthologies collected excerpts of poetry and prose organized by grade or theme, presenting fragments of verse valued for ease of comprehension and delivery rather than for their integrity or complexity as complete texts. In this guise, the overt moral statements, conventional sentiments, obvious imagery, and comfortable rhymes made poets like Whittier and Longfellow into “schoolroom poets,” from whom children might, through the discipline of memorization, acquire rudimentary moral sense as well as vocal training and rhetorical skills that continued throughout the nineteenth century to distinguish literary performance as a public art.

By organizing her study into multiple histories of practice, Rubin highlights continuities of time and place that have otherwise escaped the academic accounting of literary history. Sampling curricula, and state and local courses of study, from 1917 to 1939, for example, Rubin discovers that prescribed reading continued to be dominated by nineteenth-century works such as “Evangeline” and “Thanatopsis.” Despite the ferment of the “new poetry” that arose in the 1910s and 1920s, “it did not much infiltrate American classrooms for two decades.” In purpose as well as materials, the aesthetics of poetry remained, in the supposed age of Eliot and Pound, indexed to enjoyment of language rather than its decoding, to moral instruction rather than interpretation. “The dominant techniques for achieving those ends were repetition, equation of theme with meaning, and structured extraction of an ethical principle” (123). Even as educators embraced Progressive educational precepts of “experience,” they essentially translated aesthetic, moral, and patriotic uses of the nineteenth century into a more “modern” idiom of goals that were vocational, cultural, social, and ethical, and to which some new poets such as Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, and Millay could be assimilated. Particularly surprising in this chapter is the enduring focus on oral performance, dramatized by Rubin's exploration of the “speaking choirs” in the 1930s, where a specifically communal experience, universalized meanings, and civic idealism continued to be celebrated over the more “subjective,” “personal,” or “introspective” tendencies of modernist literature.

As all of her cases suggest, the “meaning” of poetry beyond the academic canon was shaped by the institutional status of the genre and the social functions of reading more than by the internal coherence and complexity of particular texts. In many settings devoted to civic commemoration and Americanization, both liberals and conservatives could enlist the same eclectic mix of old and new poems to support different civic ideals—demonstrating the “resilience and versatility of text and practice, depending on how and where readers read them” (241). In best-selling anthologies that appeared in both the World War I and World War II, civic duty became the common cause of free verse and rhyme, high-minded moralism, and allusive symbolism, so that even the most ironic and rebellious voices of early modernism became testaments to the sincerity and idealism of collective commitment. In that sense, what Rubin calls the “pluralistic possibilities of poems themselves” reflected both the special institutional status of the genre of poetry and the general function of advanced literacy in social reproduction. Within the graded, hierarchical, and standardized curriculum of the public schools, after all, all literary texts had the same meaning as vehicles of homogenization and tokens of educational achievement. When immigrants fondly recalled public recitations, what the words of any text mean is peripheral, if not irrelevant, to what its oral performance signals to them and to the native-born about their mastery of English and their assimilation of a shared, “American” identity. So, too, when Anna Hempstead Branch worked for decades to make poetry central to the work of the Christadora settlement house in New York City and the Poetry Guild she founded there, she was harnessing a genteel, quasi-mystical faith in the genre that she had acquired at Smith College to the ends of community service. Among her many initiatives was the guild's Unbound Anthology, which sold loose-leaf reprints of poems for pennies apiece, allowing workers and students to assemble their own personal collections of poetry.

With the expansion of mass literacy, the social meaning of texts depended upon their distribution across the social landscape. As the researches of the Zborays and Rubin suggest, literature derived symbolic power from two directions: differential skills of reading, writing, and speaking that individuals acquired within the home, the school, and myriad contexts of leisure and work on the one hand, and the standardization of hierarchical literary values within the commercial marketplace and state-sponsored curriculums on the other. For this reason, the modern experience of literature is inseparable from the meaning of class, although neither of these studies develops this angle on their materials. As Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, John Guillory, and other scholars have argued, the elaboration of literature as an institution of the modern academy was bound up with competition for cultural capital, the acquisition of distinction in environments increasingly organized by access to education and pursuit of its social and economic rewards. Thus the Unbound Anthology took the curriculum out of the classroom without taking the classroom out of the curriculum. To “unbind” the canon, as Rubin notes, was to defy “allegiance to hierarchical classification schemes that differentiated poems on aesthetic grounds.” If, however, “social purpose can override distinctions between popular and canonical texts,” those purposes can amplify symbolic values of cultural capital—poetry's value as a collective symbol of human equality and national unity, for example—without distributing its practical institutional benefits. To read poetry in the classroom or outside it, in silence or out loud, is to partake in the democratic ideology of learning as a social leveler; but only in the classroom, and only through one's competition for individual advancement to other classrooms, and the specialization in individual skills of reading and writing it brings, does one get the diploma.

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It has always been the social function of literature and other arts to give ritual, collective expression to otherwise irrational, inarticulate, and evanescent human passions. Since the eighteenth century it has become the special business of genres of modern literature such as the novel and the lyric to furnish ever-larger reading audiences with maps for private experience, popularizing narratives, symbols, characters, and sentiments, which made that experience at once more personal and more conventional. With the expansion of mass literacy in the nineteenth century, forms of social life became intensively mediated by literary institutions, values, and practices, in ways that identified the experience of individuality itself with the performance of literary taste. With varied degrees of self-consciousness, individuals read, wrote, and spoke in ways that made once silent contexts and practices of ordinary experience visible, intelligible, and affective as sites of self-representation and sociability.

In recovering the social diversity and popular ubiquity of literary practices, both of these studies confront methodological problems fundamental to the writing of cultural and intellectual history. How should scholars define and interpret the history of literature when it serves emotional needs and social purposes that may have little relation to the words on a page? What do those needs have to do with literary forms, or with the structural conditions in which vernacular literature became an institution of secondary and collegiate education? As readers found their textual lives to be increasingly at odds with the so-called real world, was “the pill of middle-class ideology . . . to be sweetened by the sugar of literature,” as Terry Eagleton puts it?Footnote ¹ Or might the imaginative freedom and moral sincerity that readers found in literature—the subjective experience of texts, the meaning of feeling—have historical reality apart from, if not determining of, the social patterns in their uses?

In the preface to their book, Ronald and Mary Zboray declare that they will make “generalizations derived from our grasp of the full documentary base,” supported by “quotes of paraphrases, from a few illustrative cases.” “We otherwise minimized our interjections in the name of permitting our informants to speak for themselves directly to readers and, indeed, to one another, as if all were sitting around the same table.” In asking the authors of diaries to “speak for themselves,” and sitting them around a table together, the Zborays make assumptions about historical time and space shared by scholars in many disciplines in the writing of literary and cultural history. As in Benedict Anderson's theory of print nationalism, our sources occupy virtual communities, addressing one another within the simultaneity of time and place afforded by publication. As in the Habermasian public sphere, we abstract ideas from the particularity of material forms and lived contexts, figuring identities for autonomous “subjects” through the publication of their figurative speech. By selective quotations, we extract from artifacts discrete units of text; we link these units within critical and conceptual frameworks, lending our otherwise anarchic, piecemeal body of evidence a new coherence—the completeness, for example, of a table, an “imagined community,” a “sphere,” or indeed a “culture.” Thus do we identify with our sources, attributing kinds of personhood to the authorship of texts, and transform even practices of documentation into exercises of imagination. As the Zborays themselves admit, “Historians must live variously yet observantly through the key informant's textual representation of everyday life” (xx).

The Zborays declare their commitment to norms of positivist objectivity common to the modern social sciences, highlighting the quantitative basis of their evidence and their reliance on representative sampling and the testimony of “informants.” They further justify their own publication of their sources according to an ethics of representation with its own methodological bias: “A book about past experience should more demonstrate it in its original context than discuss it in today's academic idioms” (xix). “Original context” is, however, itself a literary creation, a sort of reality effect for the writing of history. The sources cited by the Zborays are not, after all, actually speaking their words; they cannot speak “directly” to readers, let alone to one another, but can only be heard through the labor—prodigious, in this case—of scholars writing and thinking on their behalf. Accordingly, their typical procedure in handling their evidence is to quote from a diary and then to offer a sentence that summarizes its meaning. In a literal sense, the paragraphs in their study unfold in dialogue, sources speaking in quotation marks, the authors answering them, demonstrating that they have both “heard” and, by avoiding engagement with “academic idioms,” presumably respected their sources. As this strategy repeats itself, any one of these voices loses particularity, vanishing into the anonymous mass of the archive. Though first recorded within the particularity of a document no less than the original context of its informant's life, every quotation becomes representative of the same general propositions about the priority of “social meaning” and the intellectual dignity of “everyday” life.

In seeking to have their sources to “speak” for themselves, the Zborays have been seduced by the academic romance for the ordinary. Reluctant to actively interpret the language and concepts used by their sources, the documentary method here seems to assume the self-evident transparency of words and feelings. In glossing the citations, the Zborays present reassuringly familiar but ahistorical verities about human nature: “everyday scribblers took up their pens when they needed to confront and stabilize agitated feelings” (52); “making composition sociable eased the pain and pushed the pen” (57); “while holiday notes spread good cheer and kind words to acquaintances, the gift of love in verse form might be given at any time of the year” (64); “although joyous everyday literature abounded, sad missives did, too” (65); “religious meditations, like romantic verse written to enhance everyday observations or prose penned for therapeutic ends, naturally flowed from inspirational source, to author's mind, to blank page” (55). This insistence on the seemingly inexorable and obvious meanings of historical texts seems to make them oddly inert, to suspend them in the amber of nostalgia.

Under the pressure of such generalization, the informants that the Zborays work so hard to hear cease to be subjects of literary experience or historical actors. The result is an oddly mechanistic account of intellectual activity, one that is amplified by the organizational scheme of the book as a whole. Do ideas “naturally flow from inspirational source”? Does it showcase either the creativity of mental and emotional life, or the dynamism of communal exchange, to argue that “literature” or “ideas” are “produced,” “disseminated” and “received”? Borrowing from the analysis of mass production, this familiar schema reminds us of the scholarly truism that the phenomena we call “culture” are material, subject to the arrangements that structure modern economic activity. Although they repeat the categories throughout their study, the Zborays never deliberately argue for the value of applying concepts drawn from the modern processes of industry to artifacts of culture that, in the antebellum period, became increasingly popular. Instead, we have an oddly static picture of advanced literacy, with little analysis of change that was occurring over the course of the average life span of a New Englander, and in the communities in which individuals cultivated their literary practices. So, too, this ill-conceived schema ends up showcasing the fragmentary nature of the documentation rather than its coherence. The book repeatedly cites, for example, a relatively small set of diaries—the Vermont farmer Charles Cobb, for instance, or the African-American Charlotte Forten—but scatters these references across every section of the book.

Paradoxically, through their ambition to create a quantitative “baseline” for archival research into the history of reading, the Zborays have stripped “everyday” phenomena of their historical significance as a local space for the individual and collective realization of intellectual and aesthetic value. Had they engaged the arguments and methods of fellow historians of literacy and print culture (including those working not only in the social sciences but in literary criticism, whose substantial recent work in this area is essentially ignored), the Zborays might have been more resourceful in their qualitative assessment of historical evidence. Whatever the “human capacity” for literary taste and talent, what people do with literacy skills and why is conditioned by who they are and where they live. How, after all, can we even begin to describe “layers of social meaning” without appreciating the interplay of institutions, practices, and values within which the acquisition and social performance of literacy occurs? When heard in aggregate, through fragments of quotation forming a composite “socioliterary experience” of New Englanders, these voices tell us little about how social life was transformed by mass literacy. To uncover “layers of social meaning” requires more local forms of analysis and interpretation that follow up on the literary life of a particular family or community; it requires attempts to map patterns of literary practice by which individuals navigate their personal experiences of change over time, of social continuity or temporal dislocation.

Locating American poetry within particular histories of multiple spaces, Joan Rubin develops a sophisticated analysis of reading that is attentive both to larger patterns of social practice and to the personal motives and circumstances by which individuals invested the seemingly impersonal, public values of poetry with startling and enduring emotional power. Rubin's analysis benefits from the stunning variety of evidence through which it moves. In an outstanding chapter on religious uses of poetry, for example, Rubin includes innumerable anthologies designed to aid the devotional practices of particular Protestant denominations as well as Catholics; Reform Judaism's revisions of the Union Prayer Book (1891); contemporary literary criticism and pedagogical tracts; reprints of verse in Methodist newspapers, the homiletics of “preaching through poetry” developed by William Stidger, a minister in St Louis in the 1920s who later became a professor of theology at Boston University; and scripts for “open-air” services hosted by YMCA camps. This material is topped off by a sample of twenty-five journals, diaries, and memoirs created by Baptist ministers and missionaries from the later nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. In this chapter, as throughout Songs of Ourselves, Rubin cuts a narrative path through this archive by offering impressionistic biographical portraits of Isabel Crawford (b. 1865), a missionary who compiled verse in a scrapbook; a Baptist clergyman named William Darrow (b. 1864), who in his diary kept detailed records of poetry and fiction he borrowed from public libraries; John Curtis (b. 1870), a missionary to India who subscribed to the Book of the Month Club. In responding to and writing about literature, these and the other teachers, writers, critics, ministers, missionaries, and other readers were engaged alike in creative revision of poetry and faith, cultivating critical practices of reading that often blurred the emotional consolations and moral certainties of Victorian poetry with openness to the experimentation and autonomy of modern literature. As the many case studies throughout the chapter demonstrate, ideas are not produced, disseminated and consumed. They evolve from the interplay of intellectual currents and aesthetic tastes over generations. They not only evolve within institutional networks and commercial markets for learning, leisure, and recreation sustained by modern print culture; they also develop through the adaptations and appropriations of individuals within particular communities seeking to make poetic forms responsive to religious traditions, to make traditions newly relevant to lived experience.

Sifting through this archive with impressive empathy and sensitivity, Songs of Ourselves argues by its method that the social and emotional uses of literature are, finally, best apprehended qualitatively, within the context of individual lives, rather than in aggregate. In a superb chapter on domestic contexts for reading poetry, Rubin demonstrates the ways that feeling is not only represented in literary performances in print but is also created in the gestures, sounds, and routines of social exchange. To learn that a dominant use of sharing verse aloud was “to signify the shelter and stability of the family”(253) does not necessarily distinguish reading from eating dinner, gathering around the radio, watching television, playing board games, or any number of other rituals organizing life in the modern home. But Rubin dwells at length on examples drawn from diaries and memoirs, interpreting the words of her sources with acute insight into the intricate ways individuals used their encounters with and recollections of verse to balance contending needs for security and autonomy. An invalid New England girl writes of the reassurance she found in her father's bedside recitation of the same two poems, suggesting the “poetry's power to convey intimacy and yet to hold it at bay by spiritualizing it” (260). The newspaper reporter Margaret Parton writes of her intellectual parents' response to her own tastes and attempts at verse, and of the way the lines of Stephen Spender entered into her passionate affair with a British diplomat as well as her relationship with her father. From a 1907 entry in Mary Ann Stewart's diary and another one a few years later, Rubin suggests that a rare fireside reading of Matthew Arnold with her married son could, “by refilling the house with her son's voice, make it a space in which she could retrieve his undivided loyalty” (262). Through detailed parsing of what people wrote and said, Rubin can delve more fully than do the Zborays into the “social layers” to which they refer, demonstrating how domestic feeling was embodied in material contexts and temporal rhythms of reading, for which a poem might be the prop, setting, inspiration, or fetish. No less than the ‘difficult’ works of high modernist sages, the voices of the past can only be ‘heard’ through a dexterity of interpretation. In contrast, however, to the bounding of interpretation to the imputed ‘depth’ of particular texts, this interpretation entails a patient imagination of the relation between words across the documentary record that in the best instances can turn even historians into accomplished literary critics, and cultural history into a poetics of symbolic implication. As critics wonder what the next theory fad will be, and worry more generally about the future of literary studies, they might take inspiration from models of analysis—quantitative and qualitative, historical and empirical—that historians are bringing to the study of texts.

If, in an age of information overload, it remains more than ever the duty of literary studies to ask what texts are good to think with, the history of literary practices can help scholars look more critically and self-consciously at what constitutes better thinking within their disciplinary and institutional contexts. Such a history can also help scholars explore why and how, within our broader culture, some texts have been better to feel with than others. Quite aside from what texts mean, we have much to learn about how we live with texts. The literary imagination is a social faculty, not only in the sense that the texts we engage with are peopled with the representations of voice and feelings and characters inviting our identification, but also in the sense that liberal culture entails enormous creativity and imagination as an engine of kinship. As both of these studies suggest, literary practices became entwined with emotional life, extending the capacity for sympathy across the facts of social difference. Through newly common practices of reading, writing, and speaking, individuals learned to share a language for emotional experience, and cultivated feeling itself within specifically literary forms of social attachment. While it is possible that electronic and digital media will soon supplant printed texts, both in and out of school, as the primary nursemaid of our affections, these new technologies may serve emotional needs and social purposes first made necessary to the cultural life of American liberalism by literary practices and objects. The replication and diversification of literary objects and practices since the early nineteenth century helped to make social relationships themselves expressions of personal taste and autonomous choice—extensions of our identity as individuals, as mobile, provisional, and finally arbitrary as the books we read, the quotations we recite. The social history of literary practices can teach us more generally about the way that impersonal stories, voices, images, phrases, and clichés that circulate within mass culture became intimate attributes of personal identity—the very sound and syntax of numberless lives, singing in unison.