Günter Leypoldt is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Value (2025), and coeditor of Authority and Trust in US Culture and Society (2021) and Reading Practices (2015). His essays appeared in such journals as American Journal of Cultural Sociology, American Literary History, Poetics, Modern Language Quarterly, New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and Post45.

Abstract:

"Literature’s Social Lives" proposes a new value theory and sketches a socio-institutional history of US and (mostly) Anglophone literary culture from the 1800s to the present. It situates itself within an emerging field of a sociologically attuned literary criticism, which combines ethnographic interest in the aesthetics of literary experience with a curiosity about how literature gains cultural relevance and institutional authority. The largest thesis is that the ever-rising turnover of books between 1800 and 2000 expanded the commercial
literary marketplace, yet, by inverse subsidy, also stabilized literature’s market-sheltered support systems. Today’s literary culture seems beset not just by market bottom lines but also by scholastic corps effects emerging from writers’ and readers’ investments in academically shaped economies of prestige.