Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

by Amy Blair

A person who reads a book for self-improvement rather than aesthetic pleasure is reading up. Reading Up is Amy Blair's engaging study of popular literary critics who promoted reading generally and specific books as vehicles for acquiring cultural competence and economic mobility. Combining methodologies from the history of the book and the history of reading, to mass-cultural studies, reader-response criticism, reception studies, and formalist literary analysis, Blair shows how such critics influenced the choices of striving readers and popularized some elite writers. Framed by an analysis of Hamilton Wright Mabie's role promoting the concept of reading up during his ten-year stint as the cultivator of literary taste for the highly popular Ladies' Home Journal, Reading Up reveals how readers flocked to literary works they would be expected to dislike. Blair shows that while readers could be led to certain books by a trusted adviser, they frequently followed their own path in interpreting them in unexpected ways.

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 2011

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely brilliant book. This book demonstrates the gift of careful research, a provocative argument, and great writing.

Blair explores, as a foundational source, the columns by Hamilton Wright Mabie in the Ladies’ Home Journal. This may not seem the most riveting of data sets.

But...

But...

The argument focuses on the period from 1880 to the 1920s, particularly in the United States. Blair shows how columns in popular publications attempted to (staunchly) recommend particular literary genres to 'improve' young women. Romance was discounted. Realism, with its attendant nationalism, was valued and promoted.

The goal was to 'read up.' To use reading as a strategy for social mobility.

This book has humour, energy, rigour, and a fascinating argument.

It is fabulous.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, exciting scholarship. Don't be misled into thinking that this is just another book arguing that the middle class reads for cultural capital. Blair uses a long-running literary advice column to make, two main claims: one, that the average middle class reader approached literature with a fluid sense of the realism/romanticism divide - and authors were aware of this fact - and two, that this allowed them to read for particular characteristics of texts, producing potentially counterintuitive or selective readings. Following the advice of her columnist, Blair performs exciting readings of "high" yet popular literary texts of the period that help us understand their seemingly paradoxical history. Biggest regret: that there weren't more advice columns / books used (though I am convinced by Blair's argument that this is an unusually important one).

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A smart and well-written book that discusses what the author terms "reading-up": the use of reading to attain cultural, social, and economic capital and mobility. Blair is a good story teller and keeps readers interested in how and what people read at the turn of the twentieth century and why.