Dear Reader: Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-century British Fiction - Softcover

Stewart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801852838 ISBN 13: 9780801852831

Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, 1996

Synopsis

With the "great traditions" from Austen through Dickens and Eliot to Hardy read here 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 a priori reader function toward this reader figure, this volume 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

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

Edition details

• Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801852838
• ISBN 13: 9780801852831
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464