Portside

Tracing the history of an idea, the author charts liberalism’s two century Jekyll and Hyde existence as a credo on freedom and an ill-fitting defender of mass democracy.

The author queries the existence of bad readers, linking causes not to illiteracy or injuries of class or the diffusion of mass culture, but to a Cold War literary trend sporting "an abundance of paraliterary works," such as memoirs, diaries, biographies, diplomatic studies, and feature reports as primers for engaging with literary texts as seemingly historically accurate yet stressing outcomes and expectations consonant with systemic social ends.

John Rees, author of The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organization in England 1640-1650, (Verso, 2016; reviewed in Portside Culture, November 30, 2016) weighs in with his recommendations about some of the best fiction in English dealing with radical movements and the revolutionary experience.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has gone through many editions, but the 1910-1911 scholars edition is nonpareil. Dennis Boyles' book says why, and enumerates what is lost when readers gain accessibility and cost-savings from easy access to Wikipedia and other venues but lose in depth and authority.