Home Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins (ISBN: 9780822345886)

Stock photo: cover may vary

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture Hardback - 2010

Name: Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture
Price: 14.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Collins, Jim
ISBN: 9780822345886

by Jim Collins

Add to wish list

Browse more copies for sale ↓

Reader reviews for Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

Write a review for this book

Important Terms and Guidelines

Please focus on the book’s content and context. Also, add any personal comments as to how you enjoyed the book. Substantiate your likes and dislikes. You may make comparisons to other books.
Reviews must be at least 140 characters in length.
Please do not reveal critical plot elements.
This is not a help line. Contact customer support if you need help.

Your review must not include:

Obscenities, discriminatory language, or other insulting language not suitable for public domain
Advertisements, “spam” content, or references to other products, offers or websites.
Email addresses, URLs, phone numbers, physical addresses or other contact information.
Overly critical comments about other reviews or reviewers
Time-sensitive material (i.e. promotional tours, seminars, lectures, etc.)
Availability, price, or alternative ordering/shipping information

From the publisher

Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah's Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media.

Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a "literary experience" in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins's analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

From the rear cover

"In this lively, always insightful but never predictable book, Jim Collins claims that literary culture is alive and well today, but that to understand it we must also understand the variety of institutions and technologies that house and drive it, its storage and delivery systems, and its new forms of connoisseurship. He makes us think about what it means to love literature, and how a cultural activity comes to be enjoyed as popular culture."--Linda Hutcheon, author of "A Theory of Adaptation"

Details

Title Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture
Author Jim Collins
Binding Hardback
Pages 300
Volumes 1
Language ENG
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, U.S.A.
Publication date 2010-06
Illustrated Yes
Features Bibliography, Illustrated, Index, Table of Contents
ISBN 9780822345886 / 0822345889
Weight 1.3 lbs (0.59 kg)
Dimensions 9.4 x 6.1 x 0.9 in (23.88 x 15.49 x 2.29 cm)
Category Literature - Classics / Criticism
Library of Congress subjects Popular culture - United States, Electronic books
Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2009049951
Dewey Decimal Code 306.097

Media reviews

Citations

Choice, 01/01/2011, Page 0

About the author

Jim Collins is Professor of Film and Television, and English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age and Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism; the editor of High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment; and a co-editor of Film Theory Goes to the Movies.

More Copies for Sale

Stock photo: cover may vary