Literatura kak opyt ili Burzhuaznyi chitatel' kak kul'turnyi geroi

The book examines the process of forming literature as a cultural institution in Western Europe in the 19th century and reveals the relationship between two seemingly distant phenomena of cultural life: the 'bourgeois century' and the 'literature age'. The focus of the study is the figure of the bourgeois reader, who turned out to be paradoxically involved in both market-exchange and aesthetic practices of his time. The book pays special attention to the type of literary imagination cultivated in the bourgeois environment: it implied the ability of the interested reader to participate in the literary experiment with the form, to enter into a creative dialogue with the author and thus generate a kind of sociality in the reading. By the methods of sociological poetics, the texts of classical poets - W. Wordsworth, E.A. Po, C. Bodler, W. Whitman and the novelists - O. de Balzac, G. Melville, G. Flaubert, J. Elliott - are analyzed and reinterpreted in a new way. in which the ideal of free