New Directions in American Reception Study [Paperback]

This collection reconsiders and extends reception research in literary studies, book history, and media/cultural studies and marks out new directions for such work by reevaluating its methodologies and by examining not only traditional American literature but also women's, African-American, and multicultural literatures, popular culture, the ordinary reader, and the role of reception in the history of the book.Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity of approaches and methods, including the institutional, textual, historical, authorial, and reader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent, acknowledge the various ways in which readers have found texts-- literature, television shows, movies, and newspapers--meaningful. This collection emphasizes that new diversity, examining movies, newspapers, fans, television shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's literature. The essays on literature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction, Kenneth Roemer on Edward Bellamy's utopian workLooking Backward, Amy Blair on the popularity of Sinclair Lewis'sMain Street, Marcial Gonzalez on Danny Santiago and his Hispanic novelFamous All Over Town, and Leonard Diepeveen on modernist fiction and criticism. The theoretical essays on reader-oriented criticism include Patsy Schweickart on interpretation and the ethics of careand Jack Bratich on active audiences. Media versions of response criticism include Andrea Press and Camille Johnson's ethnographic analysis of fans of theOprah Winfrey Show, Janet Staiger on Robert Aldrich's film version of Mickey Spillane'sKiss Me Deadly, and Rhiannon Bury on the fans of the HBO television showSix Feet Under. History-of-the-book versions include Barbara Hochman on the popularity of the 1890s editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin, Ellen Garvey on nineteenth-century scrapbooks of newspaper, and David Nord on earlyló!