Nineteenth-Century Reviews and Reviewing: Communication, Compression, and Commerce

Abstract

Abstract:The book review is a mercurial mode. Is it a genre, a form, or a techne? Is the review so capacious in expression and function that it discourages efforts to talk about it in general terms? Is it as a textual object separable from the act of reviewing; that is, does the noun always imply the verb? How do we navigate the range of affordances that attach to reviewing as a process, a profession, an act of production? This introduction to a special issue on the book review in the nineteenth-century addresses these questions to expand our knowledge of reviewing culture and offer conceptual frameworks for studying reviews.