The book examines the process of the formation of literature as a cultural institution in Western Europe in the 19th century and reveals the relationship between two, at first glance, distant phenomena of cultural life: the “age of the bourgeois” and the “age of literature.” The focus of the study is the figure of the bourgeois reader, who turned out to be paradoxically involved in both the market exchange and aesthetic practices of his time. The book pays special attention to the type of literary imagination cultivated in the bourgeois environment: it assumed the ability of an interested reader to participate in a literary experiment with form, enter into a creative dialogue with the author, and thus generate a kind of new sociality in the act of reading. Using the methods of sociological poetics, the texts of classical poets - W. Wordsworth, E. A. Poe, C. Baudelaire, W. Whitman and novelists - O. de Balzac, G. Melville, G. Flaubert, J. Eliot, are analyzed and reinterpreted in a new way. - in which the ideal of free, public-private communication and egalitarian cooperation between reader and author was realized.