Collins Jim Collins

Bring on the Books for Everybody (eBook, PDF)

How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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 "e;literary experience"e; 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 287
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Juni 2010
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822391975
• Artikelnr.: 54815816

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Digital Books, Beach Chairs, and Popular Literary Culture 1
Part I. The New Infrastructure of Reading: Sites, Delivery Systems,
Authorities
1. The End of Civilization (or at Least Civilized Reading) as You Know It:
Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and Self-Cultivation 39
2. Book Clubs, Book Lust, and National Librarians: Literary Connoisseurship
as Popular Entertainment 80
Part II. The Literary Experience in Visual Cultures
3. The Movie Was Better: The Rise of the Cine-Literary 117
4. "Miramaxing": Beyond Mere Adaptation 141
Part III. Popular Literary Fiction
5. Sex and the Post-Literary City 183
6. The Devoutly Literary Bestseller 221
Bibliography 267
Index 271