First Published in 1998

This is Volume VII of a nine volume library of Sociology on the Sociology of Culture and includes a study on the sociology of literary taste.

The idea underlying the book is that the concordance of liking evoked by certain works of art, called taste, is due to something other than a simple excellence inherent in the quality of the work itself; rather it is the product of a complex process in which a range of forces—some ideological, some material—content with one another and produces something that is far immune from the actions chance.