LITERARY JUDGEMENT AND CULTURAL GATEKEEPING: DOROTHY PARKER’S BOOK REVIEWS IN ESQUIRE AS AN INDEX OF MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERARY VALUES
LITERARY JUDGEMENT AND CULTURAL GATEKEEPING: DOROTHY PARKER’S BOOK REVIEWS IN ESQUIRE AS AN INDEX OF MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERARY VALUES

Summary/Abstract: The article examines Dorothy Parker’s later book reviews and review-essays for Esquire magazine, especially those reprinted in The Collected Dorothy Parker, as evidence of mid-twentieth-century American literary criticism in practice. Combining close reading, reception-oriented comparison and contextual analysis, it considers Parker’s evaluations of canonical, emerging and popular writers alongside a selection of archived contemporary reviews. The aim is not necessarily to test whether her judgements were correct, but to reconstruct the critical uncertainty in which reviewers like her write and to show how literary value was negotiated in the periodical culture of the time. Framed by Bourdieu’s theory of cultural consecration and Chong’s account of reviewing as a socially situated practice, the article argues that Parker’s criticism functioned as a form of literary agency through which value was produced, circulated and contested.

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