The Ulysses Delusion Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit

“The author provides her readers with a new set of guidelines for judging literary works, specifically novels. … The ‘Ulysses’ Delusion is an ideal model of clear, thoughtful, balanced, witty, and well-written criticism—something I find in extremely short supply these days. … Konchar Farr’s own writing succeeds admirably. This book really is a page-turner.” (Mallory Young, TSWL Tulsa Studies in Women's Literatur, Vol. 38 (2), 2019)



"The
Ulysses
Delusion
is an engaging discussion of the contemporary literary marketplace and the tastemakers who have framed discussions of literary quality and served as the gatekeepers to popular success in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Konchar Farr's unapologetic championing of the accessible is both ideologically resonant with her thesis and admirable—she has truly produced a popular literary criticism that is both rigorous and readable." - Amy L. Blair, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, USA and author of

Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States