How did summer reading become “a thing”?
,” a new history by the academic Donna Harrington-Lueker, unpacks both the constructedness of “summer reading” and its gravitational pull. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, urbanization and industrialization gave summertime a new radiance—it offered a chance to escape the sweaty, overcrowded city and reconnect with nature. The steamship and the railroad made vacation getaways more accessible.
To accommodate them, the publishing industry got to work shaping a correspondingly alluring discourse around summer reading. Some Victorians were concerned about the vulgar seductions of fiction, especially the sensational stories that multiplied as production costs declined. But the book industry seized the chance to rebrand summer novels as “an acceptable middle-class pleasure,” Harrington-Lueker writes. Such P.R. craft failed to convince everyone. But it was convincing enough.
“Books for Idle Hours” is especially interesting on the emergence of a new type of textual diversion: the American summer novel. It unfolds in a resort setting. Its episodic, plot-driven structure makes it easy to put down and resume again amid festive interruptions—the barbecue, the lake trip. The American summer novel spotlights unmarried youngsters, especially solo women; it croons of courtship and love.
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