In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete "periods." Since that time, scholars' def

Just as a traveler crossing a continent won’t sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can’t grasp the largest patterns organizing literary

How does new writing emerge and find readers today? Why does one writer's work become famous while another's remains invisible? Making Literature Now tells the

In a series of articles published in Tait's Magazine in 1834, Thomas DeQuincey catalogued four potential instances of plagiarism in the work of his friend and l

This book shares with a number of recent studies an interest in the historical development of English in the United States, in how it became a central disciplin