{"title":"Austen's Malleability: Fans, Adaptations, and Value Production","authors":"Nicole Peters","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0074","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Jane Austen's novels are part of an archive that has historically been situated in the tension over the \"right\" way to read a text. Indeed, her popularity among both recreational and professional readers positions her as a uniquely useful figure to track the divisions between low and high culture, good and bad reading, precisely because her reception is famously linked to both sets of practices. This article reads Austen's complicated reception in terms of the affective relationship her readers impose on the texts in order to highlight the many boundaries and terrains her readers occupy: critical vs. popular ways of reading, affected vs. affecting readerships, historical vs. fictional models for understanding her value. As Austen fans make these boundaries visible by crossing them, straddling them, or dismantling them, they reveal how tenuous and problematic the parameters constraining literary value really are.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77473546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revolutionary Exceptions: Reception of The Godfather Films in Cuba","authors":"Pedro Noel Doreste","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0008","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article revisits the conditions under which Cuba illicitly acquired, exhibited, and responded to Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films in the 1970s. After a brief ban on new American media imports—considered anti-intellectual in nature and incompatible with revolutionary ideals—following the Revolution, the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry saw fit to exhibit a Hollywood picture under the constraints of the blockade and at the height of the Cold War. To justify this break from the self-imposed boycott of contemporary Hollywood films, Cuban critics endeavored to construct a unified hermeneutics that understood the mafia as a singularly American phenomenon and the Godfather films as a form of immanent critique of capitalism. The purpose of this study is to identify Hollywood film as a persistent site of exchange or discourse between two competing ideologies. Faced with an ongoing blockade and a faltering national film industry, Cuban film criticism resisted the threat of cultural imperialism, nationalizing the limited presence of the American culture industry in the island much as it had other U.S. property a decade prior.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74443790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Hollow Crown: Quality Television and Colonial Performances","authors":"Dan Leberg","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.10.1.0027","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The Hollow Crown's adaption of Shakespeare's history plays as a Quality Television miniseries is replete with an opulent production design, a fast-paced and lucid narrational strategy, and an all-star Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC cast. At the same time, the miniseries' political commentary is a complicated blend of contemporary dramaturgical interventions within traditionally conservative interpretations under the guise of literary fidelity. As a transnational production, the miniseries precariously commodifies British literary correctness to present the miniseries to international audiences as \"authentically\" British and therefore \"authoritatively\" Shakespearean. The miniseries' representation of Welsh and French characters often equates non-English languages and accented non-British English with savagery, subordinance, and arrogance. In particular, the Henry V episode normalizes the play's imperialist politics as an authoritative interpretation by presenting Henry V as a traditionally virtuous hero while avoiding any significant commentary on economically motivated preemptive wars of conquest.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75888318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jane Eyre, Identified","authors":"Yung-Hsing Wu","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0082","url":null,"abstract":"Jane Eyre has long been held up as a novel from which feminist literary criticism in its early days learned how to read. This article suggests that intense identifications gave this emergent critical practice the momentum it needed to integrate textual and political thinking.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81611465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Nothing Is Solid. Nothing Is Fixed”: Participatory Culture and Collaborative Authorship in Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook","authors":"Emily M. Hall","doi":"10.5325/reception.9.1.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.9.1.0023","url":null,"abstract":"As recent reading theorists have noted, digitization has given rise to participatory culture, as the boundaries between author/reader, creator/user have blurred. While studies have focused on the expanding role of the reader, few have critiqued how contemporary writers respond to their eroding authority. This article explores Jeanette Winterson’s 2000 novel The Powerbook within this context and suggests that the novel depicts the dangers of collaborative authorship and forewarns that digitization forces authors to concede authority and power to readers who assume writerly positions. Studies on Winterson’s text have typically argued that the novel promotes democratic, and even feminist, notions of authorship. However, this article refutes these claims as the protagonist prohibits her collaborator from assuming an equal authorial role. Hall demonstrates how The Powerbook foresees contemporary authorship as limited and de-centered, which helps us understand why twenty-first century authors fear that digitization has created empowered readers.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90231583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Sole Province of the Public Reader”: Elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown’s Performances of the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar","authors":"A. Harris","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0036","url":null,"abstract":"From the 1880s through the 1910s, elocution, the art of reciting literature, flourished. While remembered today as an eclectic aspect of nineteenth-century school curricula, professional elocutionists’ dramatic recitations were popular events. Unlike authors who read their original works or theater troupes who presented plays, elocutionists performed previously published literature as soloists; some even called themselves “public readers,” who offered their interpretations as creative acts. This article examines the understudied writings of African American elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown and the archival collection of her programs and performance posters. Often billed as an interpreter of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry, Brown’s public readings of his dialect poetry, including “The Party,” enhanced her audience’s silent reading of Dunbar’s work. Examining Brown’s archival record leads us to think more carefully about how Dunbar may have crafted his dialect poems. For example, situating “The Party” in the context of other elocutionary recital pieces highlights how the poem subverts the conventions of these popular poems.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89423661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Book Advice Column as Evidence of Reception","authors":"A. Blair","doi":"10.5325/reception.9.1.0087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.9.1.0087","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the extent to which reading advice columns and fan mail can be considered evidence of reception by looking Emily Newell Blair’s columns in Good Housekeeping magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. It suggests that while Blair’s columns end up telling us more about the relative range of possible receptions than about any individual moments of reception, they are evidence of a popular embrace of ecumenical middlebrow aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78391220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading Pudd’nhead Wilson: Criticism and Commentary from the Gilded Age to the Modern, Online Era","authors":"Philip Goldstein","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Although Mark Twain’s Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and his Extraordinary Twins began as a single work, Twain separated them, in a decision that has a bearing on the reception of the better-known Pudd’nhead Wilson. After briefly summarizing the differences between Twins and Pudd’nhead Wilson, this article discusses the reception history of the latter book, including the reviews, which gave the novel a mixed reception until the 1950s, when it achieved the status of a classic comparable to Huckleberry Finn: the diverse and contrary analyses of the academic criticism and the highly divided feelings of recent online responses. This article will show, moreover, that changing cultural institutions explain the differences and divisions of the reviews, which are public and general, the academic criticism, which is specialized and autonomous, and the online responses, which derive from the novel’s educational contexts.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82380006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Autism Literary Underground","authors":"J. Rose","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0056","url":null,"abstract":"Though most physicians and public health officials deny that vaccination can cause autism, many autism parents believe there is such a link, and many of them resort to alternative treatments. This article takes no position on these controversies, but it uses the methods of reception history to explain how this “underground” movement has gained traction in the face of fierce opposition from the medical establishment and the mass media. The movement belongs to a long tradition of do-it-yourself medicine, which urged patients to read medical literature and treat themselves. Large-scale surveys of vaccine-hesitant websites and parents, and an intensive study of the reading done by six autism parents, reveals that these parents read extensively and critically both refereed medical literature and Internet postings by other autism parents. They are not “antiscience,” but they are producing and consuming literature about autism and interacting with each other on social media.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77429556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Detecting a Feminist Reading Model: Clues in Marcela Serrano’s Nuestra Señora de la Soledad and in Responses from her Women Readers","authors":"A. Kuhlemann","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0045","url":null,"abstract":"This article demonstrates how Chilean Marcela Serrano’s fiction posits a political value for women readers in bonding through texts. It argues there is clear evidence of a project to model text-mediated relationships with and among her readers that can encourage women to construct more rewarding self-definitions. This project’s logistical hub resides in Serrano’s Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (1999), a novel that features a female detective and exhibits for women readers a step-by-step approach toward establishing empowering connections. This article examines this process of reading-to-connect as instantiating the feminist model of reading based on intersubjective encounters among woman reader, text, and woman writer discussed in Schweickart (1986), drawing on Adrienne Rich’s search for connection with Emily Dickinson. To provide insight into the dynamics of cultivating reading-based bonds, both within and beyond Serrano’s text, this articles uses conceptual tools from Italian feminism’s practice of relations. To assess Serrano’s putative project of connecting women through the writing and reading of female characters’ life stories, it adduces results from a reader response questionnaire conducted with a sample of Serrano’s readers. Their responses indicate that reading Serrano’s fiction can open up for women readers a space of female sociality that validates and encourages female desires.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87863299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}