Loving Literature

The study of literature generally assumes a love of literature. But what does it mean to be attached to literature, to a favorite author? And how did it come to be that those who teach literature are called upon to love it and to ensure that others do as well? Deidre Lynch writes frankly as someone passionate about novels, but as she shows in this surprising and elegant study, there is nothing self-evident about her (or your) love of literature. Her book is a riposte to those who use the phrase "the love of literature” as if its meaning were transparent and the feeling it names were wholly healthy and happy: "It is as if those on the side of the love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities.” Our ideas of literature as an object of affection, we learn, began to take shape in the late eighteenth century.  It was then that copyright decisions allowed the literary canon to emerge as a new "public domain” and the British set out to cultivate individual--and, crucially, domestic--relationships to that canon.  In unfolding this history, Lynch engages all manner of fascinating material, for example, the genre of "homes and haunts” books, which introduced readers to the environs of their favorite writers, as well as treatises on taste, commonplace books, therapeutic regimens of re-reading, and dogged projects in bibliography and bibliophilia. Lynch’s book will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the histories of reading, or literary study, and of literariness itself.