Editors' Introduction

This issue, the fifteenth volume of Reception, is also our fifth special-topics issue. Guest edited by Amy Blair and Ika Willis, this issue approaches the temporalities of reading reception from a wide variety of disciplinary and theoretical—and experiential, and anecdotal—directions. (The impulse to offer a temporal rather than a spatial metaphor here [“durations?”] is strong, but its unavailability is one of the issues that subtends this volume). As Blair and Willis’s introduction points out, reception studies have not always been sensitive to temporalities of reading, but it does not follow that reception cannot trace reading time, as some scholars have suggested. Rather, they contend that reception is precisely the place where we might most dynamically engage with accounts of the time spent, or the perceived time of, reading—or with the difficulties inherent in reconciling the incommensurability thereof. “What is this ‘reading time’ that cannot be accounted for, is always vanishing when it’s time to be counted, that seems somehow incommensurable with the rhythms of digital life and the metrics of academic productivity?” they ask in their introduction. “What are we talking about when we talk about reading time? What are we looking for when we mourn its loss?” Reception studies approaches offer many possible ways to answer these questions, as the contributors to this volume abundantly demonstrate.This volume also marks an important moment in the history of the journal, as it is the last issue of Reception for which Jim Machor will be serving as co-editor. He will be resigning from that position in September 2023 following fourteen years in the post. Jim joined Phil Goldstein as co-editor in 2010 when the journal was being published solely in an online format. When Amy Blair was appointed to replace Phil as co-editor in 2013, she and Jim secured funding from Marquette University and Kansas State University to begin publishing Reception in its current print format under the auspices of Penn State University Press. In 2011, at the suggestion of several members of the Reception Study Society Executive Committee, Jim instituted the book review component of the journal and served as its book review editor until 2019, when Yung-Hsing Wu took over that position. Jim is especially proud of having been able to work with Amy and Yung-Hsing to make Reception the leading peer-reviewed journal in the field through the publication of original, cutting-edge research and scholarship in reception studies. Jim wants to thank the RSS and its Executive Committee for giving him this opportunity to contribute to the growth and success of Reception for nearly a decade and a half. It has been a tremendously fulfilling and enjoyable experience. That joy extends, as well, to Jim’s good fortune of being able to work with Amy Blair for eleven years as co-editors. Her editorial acumen, impeccable judgment, and consummate professionalism have made the experience especially satisfying and rewarding. The journal and the Executive Committee will shortly be announcing the appointment of a new co-editor to join Amy in continuing the success of Reception as an international journal dedicated to publishing the latest scholarship and criticism in reception studies. Jim’s wisdom, his editorial expertise, his capacious knowledge, and his intellectual generosity will be missed, but those of us who continue to bring Reception to life each year will always work to follow his example, keep his words in mind, and keep his contact information at the ready (or at least until he blocks us).The book reviews in Reception 2023 speak to one another in ways that readers of the journal will recognize and, we hope, will find compelling. Philip Goldstein’s most recent book, The Theory and Practice of Reception Study: Reading Race and Gender in Twain, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison (reviewed by Matthew Vechinski), captures what reception thinking has to offer in understandings of race and gender as they occur in the reading of canonical works of U.S. fiction — a tactic Katherine Whitehurst focalizes in Precious: Identity, Adaptation, and the African-American Youth Film, her account of the cinematic afterlife of Sapphire’s Push (reviewed by Ebony Perro). Meanwhile three books—Suzanne Hobson’s Unbelief in Literary Interwar Culture: Doubting Moderns (reviewed by Cecilia Konchar-Farr); Diana Cucuz’s Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR (reviewed by Kristin Matthews); and Denise Gigante’s Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (reviewed by Sheila Liming)—dip emphatically into the affective. As their titles make clear, these books attest to the range and intensity of emotion the reception of ideas and texts can provoke, from secular doubt in religion to the cultivation of desirable femininity, to the fervor of “book madness.” A broader cast is at work in M. C. Kinniburgh’s Wild Intelligence: Poets’ Libraries and the Politics of Knowledge in Postwar America (reviewed by David Squires), Elliot T. Panek’s Understanding Reddit (reviewed by John Laudun), and Reading Novels during the Covid-19 Pandemic, by Ben Davies, Christina Lupton, and Johanne Gormsen Schmidt (reviewed by Corinna Norrick-Rühl). Poets’ libraries, Reddit, and pandemic reading may seem an unlikely clustering, but beyond their topical differences, these studies share an interest in attending to the sites and occasions where people respond to and make meaning. The work of having such a particular range of books reviewed here was considerably lessened by editorial assistant Ember Johnson, whom Yung-Hsing thanks for her energy and good humor in plunging into an entirely unfamiliar process, from reading and proofing reviews to writing reviewers and reading press catalogs. The issue concludes with our usual bibliography of other recently published books to supplement these nine reviews.As a final note, we are very pleased to announce that the Reception Study Society will finally be re-convening for its first post-pandemic, in-person conference at New Mexico State University September 28–30, 2023. Information may be found on our website, receptionstudy.org. We hope to hear from you and to see you there.