Pub Date : 2016-06-28DOI: 10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0073
M. Seybold
This article explores how Herman Melville uses the elegant structure of the April Fool’s Day prank to anticipate not only the critical and commercial failure of his final novel in 1857, but also the proclivities of the twentieth-century literary scholar. The Confidence-Man simultaneously invites and defies the many attempts to read it as allegory and, through a series of increasingly antagonistic metafictional interludes, Melville’s narrator berates his imagined reader and, vicariously, all his readers for their delusional expectations, hypocritical standards, and otherwise irrational reading habits.
{"title":"Quite an Original Failure: Melville’s Imagined Reader in The Confidence-Man","authors":"M. Seybold","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0073","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how Herman Melville uses the elegant structure of the April Fool’s Day prank to anticipate not only the critical and commercial failure of his final novel in 1857, but also the proclivities of the twentieth-century literary scholar. The Confidence-Man simultaneously invites and defies the many attempts to read it as allegory and, through a series of increasingly antagonistic metafictional interludes, Melville’s narrator berates his imagined reader and, vicariously, all his readers for their delusional expectations, hypocritical standards, and otherwise irrational reading habits.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"30 1","pages":"73 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74768518","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}
Pub Date : 2016-06-28DOI: 10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0005
Vanessa Steinroetter
This article examines the literary reception of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in Civil War America and the literary and cultural factors contributing to its remarkable popularity. After its 1862 publication in France, Les Misérables was quickly translated into English and appeared in two American editions. While previous scholarship has noted the novel’s status as a bestseller of the war, this article is the first to draw on an archive of handwritten and printed sources, including fictional and nonfictional texts, to examine the reasons Hugo’s novel resonated so strongly with Civil War American readers. This article argues that soldiers used references to the novel in their autobiographical writing to create a lens through which to view and comment on their wartime experiences, while novelists such as John Esten Cooke drew on Hugo’s message of struggle for freedom in their own cause. Additional reasons for the novel’s warm reception among American soldiers lie in its themes of fighting and suffering, potential for empathetic identification with characters and scenes, and widespread availability at a time of considerable disruptions to the literary marketplace.
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{"title":"The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America by Michael C. Cohen (review)","authors":"G. Silverman","doi":"10.5860/choice.193679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193679","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"167 1","pages":"102 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75992752","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":"What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America. by Erin A. Smith (review)","authors":"Barbara Ryan","doi":"10.5860/choice.191877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.191877","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"17 1","pages":"120 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72870937","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}
Pub Date : 2015-06-19DOI: 10.1080/10864415.1997.11518286
Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Patrocinio Philip Goldstein
After preliminary foundational work of William Harper and Issac Levi, it was only 30 years ago when the formal study of belief change or, as it is alternatively called, theory change started. The seminal work was due to Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson, a trio of researchers that was soon widely referred to by the acronym “AGM”. During the 1980s, AGM introduced a qualitative model of belief change that acknowledged three doxastic attitudes, namely, belief, disbelief and nonbelief. The problem of belief change is how these attitudes should rationally change in response to new information. Two kinds of operations were regarded as central: Revision is the transformation of beliefs that happens if some new piece of information is to be incorporated into the body of a reasoner’s beliefs; especially relevant is the case in which the new information contradicts his or her beliefs. Contraction is what happens if some piece of information is to be discarded from the body of the reasoner’s beliefs. It seems fair to say that the AGM model has been very well corroborated as a model for belief change in the case in which information comes or goes in a single package, both at a certain instant in time and over a stretch of time. The 25th anniversary of the central paper of AGM [1] on partial meet contraction and revision has recently been celebrated in a special
{"title":"Guest Editors’ Introduction","authors":"Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Patrocinio Philip Goldstein","doi":"10.1080/10864415.1997.11518286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.1997.11518286","url":null,"abstract":"After preliminary foundational work of William Harper and Issac Levi, it was only 30 years ago when the formal study of belief change or, as it is alternatively called, theory change started. The seminal work was due to Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors and David Makinson, a trio of researchers that was soon widely referred to by the acronym “AGM”. During the 1980s, AGM introduced a qualitative model of belief change that acknowledged three doxastic attitudes, namely, belief, disbelief and nonbelief. The problem of belief change is how these attitudes should rationally change in response to new information. Two kinds of operations were regarded as central: Revision is the transformation of beliefs that happens if some new piece of information is to be incorporated into the body of a reasoner’s beliefs; especially relevant is the case in which the new information contradicts his or her beliefs. Contraction is what happens if some piece of information is to be discarded from the body of the reasoner’s beliefs. It seems fair to say that the AGM model has been very well corroborated as a model for belief change in the case in which information comes or goes in a single package, both at a certain instant in time and over a stretch of time. The 25th anniversary of the central paper of AGM [1] on partial meet contraction and revision has recently been celebrated in a special","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"15 1","pages":"4 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86888838","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}
121 a course syllabus). In response to the exploitative nature of crowd-sourced digital competitions, antispec websites and blogs have sprung up, Kennedy concluding that the main criticism is not the obvious monetary issues but the failure to acknowledge the value of design. In working with a designer in the context of a home renovation, I wholeheartedly agree with the view of the participants that design should begin only after extensive discussion with the clients. Both Kennedy’s and Suhr’s chapters would have benefitted from the use of more data samples to support their claims. As for the remaining chapters, the contexts discussed are interesting, but they read like first drafts of manuscripts that require revisions to the central argument, methodology, and/or data analysis/ presentation. In sum, this is a rather slim volume that does not carve out a sharp focus or cohere particularly well. The readership can be the judge as to whether there is enough content of interest to merit further investigation. Or is there an app or algorithm for that?
{"title":"Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry by Christopher V. Trinacty (review)","authors":"I. Willis","doi":"10.5860/choice.185833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.185833","url":null,"abstract":"121 a course syllabus). In response to the exploitative nature of crowd-sourced digital competitions, antispec websites and blogs have sprung up, Kennedy concluding that the main criticism is not the obvious monetary issues but the failure to acknowledge the value of design. In working with a designer in the context of a home renovation, I wholeheartedly agree with the view of the participants that design should begin only after extensive discussion with the clients. Both Kennedy’s and Suhr’s chapters would have benefitted from the use of more data samples to support their claims. As for the remaining chapters, the contexts discussed are interesting, but they read like first drafts of manuscripts that require revisions to the central argument, methodology, and/or data analysis/ presentation. In sum, this is a rather slim volume that does not carve out a sharp focus or cohere particularly well. The readership can be the judge as to whether there is enough content of interest to merit further investigation. Or is there an app or algorithm for that?","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"1 1","pages":"121 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89645119","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}
Pub Date : 2015-06-19DOI: 10.5325/RECEPTION.7.1.0008
M. West
This essay revisits one of the thorniest issues in Hurston scholarship—the question of whether Hurston and her writings should be considered feminist. I place the debate within contemporary scholarship and address the question via an unpublished and little-known 1947 essay titled “The Lost Keys of Glory.” In this essay—a blend of folklore and analysis of gender roles—Hurston argues that most women are unable to compete with men in the workplace and that feminism has failed women. To address the incongruity between the essay and the way in which Hurston lived her life, I establish the roots of persistent late twentieth-and twenty-first-century perceptions of Hurston as a feminist. I move on to trace the lineage of the folktale Hurston uses to frame this critique of gender relations. Then, drawing from three definitions of feminism, I argue that while on the surface Hurston’s essay seems strikingly anti-feminist in the twenty-first century, when read within its original context and within various feminist frameworks, the essay does contain a number of feminist elements, suggesting that to some degree in 1947 Hurston held what we would call today feminist ideals, particularly given the ideological context of the post-World War II re-conversion era.
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Pub Date : 2015-06-19DOI: 10.5325/reception.7.1.0045
Matthew James Vechinski
This article investigates how Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club penetrated the mainstream with the help of magazines read by millions of women and teenage girls. Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal first published two stories from the book that were edited to isolate the relationships between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters. This emphasis in turn simplified the stories’ representation of Chinese-American families and peer groups, offering a way for the magazines to appeal to their audiences’ existing cultural assumptions. The book’s title story as edited for Ladies’ Home Journal celebrates an adult daughter’s renewed interest in her mother’s traditions, and the version of “The Rules of the Game” that appeared in Seventeen champions a talented young daughter asserting her independence from her mother. In addition to the reception of these stories in the context of women’s magazines, the article considers readers’ responses to The Joy Luck Club book—an example of a short story cycle by an ethnic American author. Audiences outside the academy have found it difficult to read across interlinking stories, which limits their level of engagement with the text. The demanding fictional form of Tan’s book, much like the truncated magazine versions of the stories, may actually encourage shallow interpretations of the struggles of its ethnic American characters.
本文调查了谭恩美的《喜福会》是如何借助数百万女性和少女阅读的杂志进入主流的。《十七岁》和《妇女家庭杂志》(Ladies ' Home Journal)首先发表了这本书中的两个故事，这两个故事经过编辑，将中国移民母亲和她们在美国出生的女儿之间的关系分开。这种强调反过来又简化了故事对华裔美国家庭和同龄人群体的表现，为杂志提供了一种吸引读者现有文化假设的方式。这本书的标题故事是为《女性家庭杂志》编辑的，它庆祝了一个成年女儿对母亲的传统重新产生兴趣，《十七岁》中出现的“游戏规则”版本支持一个有才华的年轻女儿坚持独立于母亲。除了在女性杂志的背景下接受这些故事外，本文还考虑了读者对《喜福会》一书的反应——这是一个美国少数族裔作家短篇小说周期的例子。学院以外的观众发现很难读懂相互关联的故事，这限制了他们对文本的参与程度。谭的书要求很高的虚构形式，很像那些故事的删节版杂志，实际上可能会鼓励对其美国种族角色的斗争进行肤浅的解读。
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1946年，西蒙与舒斯特出版了拉比·约书亚·罗思·利伯曼的畅销书《心灵的平静》，这本自助手册解释了精神病学和宗教如何共同帮助个人实现情感和精神的成熟，并最终获得幸福。在这本书出版时，利伯曼是波士顿以色列圣殿的一名拉比，他因在NBC广播节目《致以色列的信息》(Message to Israel)上的布道而闻名，该节目在波士顿和纽约市播出。重要的是，用马修·s·赫德斯特罗姆(Matthew S. Hedstrom)的话来说，利伯曼是第一个“在美国获得大量读者的非基督教作家”，唐纳德·迈耶(Donald Meyer)称《心灵的平静》是“第一本预示着战后宗教畅销书浪潮的书”。这本书的读者遍及六大洲，在《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜上停留了173周，在《出版人周刊》畅销书排行榜上停留了147周，到1964年，它已经印刷了38次。《心灵的平静》的意义在于，利伯曼将宗教、心理学和自助结合在一起，他的读者也在一定程度上接受了他在这三个领域的专家地位。在第二次世界大战之前，自助书籍的势头越来越大，这主要归功于戴尔·卡内基的《如何赢得朋友和影响他人》(1937年)和拿破仑·希尔的《思考致富》(1937年)的流行。宗教作家，如哈利读者约书亚罗思利布曼的心灵的和平
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