Bring on the Books for Everybody : How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture / Jim Collins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Collins, Jim, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Book clubs (Discussion groups).

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Other Title:

Bring on the Books for Everybody

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessmentof the robust popular literary culture that has developed in theUnited States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describeshow a once solitary and print-based experience has become anexuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as onthe page. Fueled by Oprah's Book Club, Miramax film adaptations,superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindledigital reader, literary fiction has been transformed intobest-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights theinfrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to aflourishing reading public at a time when the future of the bookhas been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has notbecome obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visualmedia. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence ofliterary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts asa "literary experience" in phenomena ranging from lush filmadaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon.Central to Collins's analysis and, he argues, to contemporaryliterary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easilyacquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it andwhose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that theredefined literary landscape has affected not just how books arebeing read, but also what sort of novels are being written forthese passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellersfrom The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy andLonging in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worldsfilled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

Contents:

The end of civilization (or at least civilized reading) as you know it : Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and self-cultivation

Book clubs, book lust, and national librarians : literary connoisseurship as popular entertainment

The movie was better : the rise of the cine-literary

"Miramaxing" : beyond mere adaptation

Sex and the post-literary city

The devoutly literary bestseller.

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-4780-9201-7