Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction - Softcover

Stewart, Professor Garrett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801852838 ISBN 13: 9780801852831

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996

Synopsis

"Ready now, reader? Easy then. That should put you in the right historical frame of mind, put you in mind of the right historical frame. For it did seem easier then, certainly more relaxed. Like the addressed and otherwise rendered nineteenth-century reader who is my subject of study, you are invited to take it slow while we back our way into the last century. We do so by moving from an unexpected modernist send-up of Victorian direct address, an early twist of phrase in E. M. Forster's 1907 The Longest Journey, to the underlying aesthetic of classic realism on which even this one rhetorical irony is by no means intended to pull the plug. On the way back to the nineteenth century, certain realist assumptions help mark out our course."--from Dear Reader

With the "great tradition" from Austen through Dickens and Eliot to Hardy read here for the first time alongside the non-canonical best-sellers of the period, we get a revised picture of an evolving readership narrated rather than merely implied, the mass audience conscripted, written with, figured in. Redirecting response aesthetics away from the a priori reader function toward this reader figure, Garrett Stewart's Dear Reader intercepts two tendencies in the recent criticism of fiction: the blanket audience determinations of ideological critique and the thinness of historicizing discourse analysis when divorced from literary history's own discursive field.

About this title

About the Author

Garrett Stewart is James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction, and Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext.

Review

"This is a work of the first importance, a major account of an entire century of British fiction. At once a powerful theoretical intervention, a sweeping literary history of the genre of the novel, and a collection of dazzling close readings of both canonical and popular fiction, it promises to become one of the truly indispensable books on the nineteenth-century novel." -- Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University

About this edition

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0801852838
• ISBN 13: 9780801852831
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 472