Bestsellers Database Project

John Unsworth, English

1999 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses/bestsellers/

ENTC 312 uses best-selling 20th-century American literature as a means of understanding 20th-century America. One bestseller from each decade is assigned as a required reading, and beyond that, each student chooses a single best-seller (from a list of the top ten fiction bestsellers for each year from 1900 to 1994) as a focus of his or her own assignments. Once chosen, the book is no longer available to be chosen by others. The course assignments include a bibliographical description of a first edition, a publication history, a biographical sketch of the author, a reception history, and a critical analysis of the work in its cultural and literary contexts (or, if copyright permits and if the student wishes, a full-text electronic edition prepared to the standards of the Electronic Text Center). The course syllabus (for Spring '98 and '99) is available at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses/entc312/s99/ and the assignments, submitted into a web-accessible database, are available at: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses/entc312/s99/picked.books.cgi.