| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders. By Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. xxvi, 430 pp. $48.00, ISBN 1-57233-471-1.)

Everyday Ideas is a very long book that has a single, simple argument at its core: that the experience of literature in antebellum America was irreducibly sociable. As obvious as that thesis may be, it still needs to be made, since social historians have been slow to take on the history of literature, and literary critics have tended to emphasize the private at the expense of the public, the solipsistic at the expense of the social, and individual at the expense of the aggregate. Using a daunting array of archival sources, Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray make a compelling case for the social embeddedness of the antebellum literary experience, and for this we are very much in their debt. Indeed, the evidence they present is so overwhelming that it will permanently alter our understanding of the literary field.

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