Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865 - Hardcover

Machor, James L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801898749 ISBN 13: 9780801898747

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011

Synopsis

James L. Machor offers a sweeping exploration of how American fiction was received in both public and private spheres in the United States before the Civil War.

Machor takes four antebellum authors―Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro'―and analyzes how their works were published, received, and interpreted. Drawing on discussions found in book reviews and in private letters and diaries, Machor examines how middle-class readers of the time engaged with contemporary fiction and how fiction reading evolved as an interpretative practice in nineteenth-century America.

Through careful analysis, Machor illuminates how the reading practices of nineteenth-century Americans shaped not only the experiences of these writers at the time but also the way the writers were received in the twentieth century. What Machor reveals is that these authors were received in ways strikingly different from how they are currently read, thereby shedding significant light on their present status in the literary canon in comparison to their critical and popular positions in their own time.

Machor deftly combines response and reception criticism and theory with work in the history of reading to engage with groundbreaking scholarship in historical hermeneutics. In so doing, Machor takes us ever closer to understanding the particular and varying reading strategies of historical audiences and how they impacted authors’ conceptions of their own readership.

About this title

About the Author

James L. Machor is a professor of English at Kansas State University, editor of Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, also published by Johns Hopkins, and coeditor of Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies and New Directions in American Reception Study.

Review

"An important book that fills significant gaps in literary and historical scholarship on the reading, reception, publishing, and interpretation of antebellum fiction."

(Barbara Hochman, Ben Gurion University)

"Recommended."

(Choice)

"A detailed and persuasive account of antebellum interpretive standards and practices."

(Milette Shamir Journal of American History)

"Those working on histories of reading and literacy or antebellum cultural history willl find this meticulously researched study a welcome contribution."

(Sari Edelstein Nineteenth-Century Contexts)

"[An] impressive book."

(Robert S. Levine American Literature)

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0801898749
• ISBN 13: 9780801898747
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 424