Literary Sites of Institutional Confirmation and Critique: Howells in the Study, Cather in the Office.

Against the backdrop of the current interest in the institutions of literature the essay deploys Luc Boltanski's social theory of institutional confirmation and critique for a comparative analysis of two key writers in the emergent field of US literature around 1900: Wiliam Dean Howells and Willa Cather. Visiting Howells in the editor's study at Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Cather in the corporate office at McClure's Magazine the essay traces how each publishing institution not only informs their criticism and correspondence but also seeps into their fiction. Framed by editorial columns and archival materials Howells's story "The Critical Bookstore" (1913) as well as Cather's early short fiction and her debut novel Alexander's Bridge (1912) can be seen to engage what Boltanski calls the "semantic security" of institutions. Building on sociologically inflected readings of these texts the essay considers Boltanski's claim that critique is an inherent effect of institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]