Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America by Richard H. Brodhead

I found this book to be disappointing: Brodhead's argument, writ large, is that to understand nineteenth century American writing, we need to understand the conditions surrounding the writers. This idea sounds right to me, but somehow the connection between the theory and the readings just doesn't work for me. Which is not to say that the readings are bad, exactly, just that in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't all hang together for me.