What makes a book “good”?

This chapter offers an overview of the study of evaluation in literature. It maps early sociological and institutional perspectives on reading as a social rather than solitary activity, in which both the meaning and evaluation of a text are socially conditioned and constructed. The chapter then considers more recent scholarship on two gateway moments that novels must pass: the evaluative judgments of acquisition editors, who decide which books are good enough to publish, and reviewers in the popular press, who tell readers which books are worth reading. Additionally, the authors attend to how evaluative processes at both input and output boundaries have been complicated by digitization. They conclude with reflections on how such studies can enrich our understanding of evaluation not only in the Arts, but as a social process more generally.