The Futures of American Literature

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Notes

¹ These and similar comments were widely reported in media; see for instance Simpson 2008.

² Peck’s “recidivist realism” resonates with what James Wood (2004) calls “hysterical realism” and with Zadie Smith’s (2008) much more positive term “lyrical realism.”

³ In 1998, The New York Times used the rubric “The last book” to report on the project at the Media Laboratory at MIT called “The last book.” In Sweden in 2001, one of the pioneers of the sociology of literature studies, Johan Svedjedal, published a collection of essays entitled Den sista boken (Eng.: The last book, 2001).