Book Reviews : Literature and the Press. By LOUIS DUDEK (Montreal, Canada: Contact Press, 1960. Pp. 238. $5.00)

• Published date: 01 September 1961
• Date: 01 September 1961
• Author: M. Neff Smart
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296101400321
• Subject Matter: Articles

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socialist society have been sacrificed to the survival of the New Class, &dquo;the
social paramountcy of the experts, the administrators, and the policemen.&dquo;
If it is true that communism has moved, in unplanned evolution, far from
its initial aims and its original meaning, as the book concludes, if great revolu-
tions progress-as they probably do according to laws of their own, then one
cannot help wondering what lies in store for communism once the stressful
period of industrialization is over and Russia is approximating the technical
culture of the West. Daniels’ dialectic may contain some clues of future de-
velopments.
FRANK MUNK
Reed College
Literature and the Press. By LOUIS DUDEK (Montreal, Canada: Contact Press,
1960. Pp. 238. $5.00)
&dquo;But we are passing now through a time of erosion of literary values
worse than any which can be recalled in western civilization (darker than the
barbaric invasions of the fifth century); and this destruction threatens ...
to become permanent.&dquo; This is the conclusion reached in Literature and the
Press, a provocative volume by Louis Dudek which signals the death of
books and which identifies and describes the forces sealing their doom. These
culprits are familiar ones: western society’s money ethic-the tyranny of cash-
and the popular newspaper it spawned. Literature’s struggle against these forces
is the plot of Dudek’s scholarly and challenging volume.
He argues that the crucial battles for literature’s virtue came in the
nineteenth century. Literary effort survived the hardships and risks of political
patronage; it survived subscription selling-which Dudek calls a &dquo;half-way
house&dquo; between literary patronage and the naked commercialization of literature
-but it could not cope with the nineteenth century’s popular press.
The challenging theory that Gutenberg’s press had little to do with the
great outburst of creative and literary energy in the century which followed is
carefully developed....