The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society is a 1982 book by American literary critic and professor Alvin Kernan. In the book, Kernan considers literature as a social institution and considers ways in which the reigning Romantic conception of literature, which has dominated Western culture for 200 years, has fallen into decline due to changes in society. Overview Kernan discusses literature as an institution of society, one made up not only of writers but also of publishers, booksellers, critics, teachers, reviewers, and readers. He maintains that, despite the appearance of fixity that literature has sometimes had, it is an institution the fluctuates and changes under historical forces. He uses as examples the role of the poet in Renaissance society, as described in Castiglioni's The Courtier, in which the poet was an expressly amateur occupation that helped the writer gain favor in service to a prince. Kernan counterposes that writerly role with the visit that King George III paid to Samuel Johnson, in which the King deferred to Johnson's knowledge of literature, books, and the academy, an encounter that Kernan argues represented a new independence for the writer, a conception that is central to the Romantic conception of the writer's role. Kernan discusses four representative novels—Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Bernard Malamud's The Tenants, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon—and maintains that each of these novels provides a "localized case-study of the way in which literature and society are interacting at the present and the institution is responding to some very basic challenges." Each of the novels features a protagonist who is a writer attempting to write a traditional poem or novel, and due to the realities they face from the world, their efforts are frustrated. Kernan's discussions of each of these novels are meant to illustrate how he contends the institution of literature is changing under pressure from society. Writing in Journal of American Studies, David Clough described Kernan's argument as follows: Kernan "identifies a further change with the post-war emphasis on 'the failure of the central "realities"' of romantic literature, and he chooses four texts to explore aspects of this. In Bellow's Humboldt's Gift he sees the powers of the poet under question; in Malamud's The Tenants it is the validity of the literary text that is in doubt; in Nabokov's Pale Fire the ability of literature to affect readers and