How Long to Read Lost in the Customhouse

How Long Does it Take to Read Lost in the Customhouse?

It takes the average reader 4 hours and 38 minutes to read Lost in the Customhouse by Jerome Loving

Assuming a reading speed of 250 words per minute. Learn more

Description

In this spirited challenge to dominant American literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the nineteenth century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for prophetic and revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the last century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society. From Washington Irving to Theodore Dreiser, Loving finds the American literary tradition filled with narrators who keep waking up to the central scene of the author's real or imagined life. They travel through a customhouse of the imagination in which the Old World experience of the present is taxed by the New World of the utopian past, where life is always cyclical instead of linear and ameliorative. Loving argues that the central literary experience in nineteenth-century America is the puritanical desire for the time before the loss of innocence - that endless chance of coming into experience anew. Lost in the Customhouse begins with a discussion of Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, and Emerson and finds these seminal Renaissance writers waking up primarily to psychological facts which blossomed into the fiction of a self begotten out of the nothingness of experience. In part 2, Loving shifts his attention to the urbanization of the American imagination and discusses Whitman, Twain, Dickinson, James, Chopin, and Dreiser. Here the dream-driven impulse is more clearly influenced by social history: abolition, women's suffrage, industrialization, and the growth of professionalism. Loving focuses upon the role of the woman who finds herself on the same frontier as her male precursors - "with nothing but a carpetbag - that is to say, the [American] ego." Throughout the study, Loving challenges the notion that American literature is preponderately "cultural work." In the epilogue, he packs up his own carpetbag and passes through the European customhouse to find that American writers are more readily perceived as literary geniuses outside of their culture than within it.

How long is Lost in the Customhouse?

Lost in the Customhouse by Jerome Loving is 269 pages long, and a total of 69,671 words.

This makes it 91% the length of the average book. It also has 85% more words than the average book.

How Long Does it Take to Read Lost in the Customhouse Aloud?

The average oral reading speed is 183 words per minute. This means it takes 6 hours and 20 minutes to read Lost in the Customhouse aloud.

What Reading Level is Lost in the Customhouse?

Lost in the Customhouse is suitable for students ages 12 and up.

Note that there may be other factors that effect this rating besides length that are not factored in on this page. This may include things like complex language or sensitive topics not suitable for students of certain ages.

When deciding what to show young students always use your best judgement and consult a professional.

Where Can I Buy Lost in the Customhouse?

Lost in the Customhouse by Jerome Loving is sold by several retailers and bookshops. However, Read Time works with Amazon to provide an easier way to purchase books.

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