Editors' Introduction

Abstract

This 2017 edition of Reception is our ninth, and we have never been more convinced that the work of studying the dynamics of reception is crucial to understanding the past and the present. We are preparing this issue for the press in the later months of 2016 and the beginning months of 2017, when it has been becoming ever clearer that politics is all a matter of reception. News is “fake” or “real” depending largely upon the lens through which one views the news, with even fact-checking sites falling suspect to allegations of bias from both the right and the left. “Intent” is irrelevant; “truth” is increasingly presented in scare quotes. President Donald Trump's first official press conference, held on February 16, 2017, was seen by some people as a resounding success, and by others an unmitigated failure. Scholars of reception can readily see the applicability of interpretive schemas like the horizon of expectations, the habitus, and the interpretive community in our contemporary political climate.It is fitting, then—and perhaps less serendipitous than one might initially think—that the featured essays in this issue are all focused to varying degrees on moments when a dominant discourse is questioned and even subverted, not by the text that is being read, but by the readers in their acts of reception (or, even, in their choices to read or not to read certain texts). In “Reading Pudd'nhead Wilson: Criticism and Commentary from the Gilded Age to the Modern, On-Line Era,” Philip Goldstein, former editor of Reception, shows how the shifting institutional status of a text can facilitate contrarian reactions and interpretations, manifested in particular in over a century of responses to Mark Twain's novel. Emily Hall's article, “‘Nothing Is Solid, Nothing Is Fixed’: Participatory Culture and Collaborative Authorship in Jeanette Winterson's The Powerbook,” rereads Winterson's novel as a representation of authorial resistance to collaborative writing and, in so doing, revises the predominant narratives about feminist authorial practice and Winterson's attitudes toward participatory culture more generally.“‘The Sole Province of the Public Reader’: Elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown's Performances of the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar,” by Amy Hobbs Harris, argues that we can better understand the contemporaneous reception of Dunbar's work through its presentations by an interpretive “public reader,” Hallie Brown. Harris also notes that the frequent critical assessment of Dunbar as a sentimental plantation poet is inconsistent with his audience's experiences of his poetry. Finally, Jonathan Rose intervenes in the current, highly contentious debate over the relationship between vaccines and autism to show that those fighting against compulsory childhood vaccination reach their conclusions through careful research of a wide variety of sources that have been validated by mainstream media and, more importantly, through peer audiences. Rose's work makes the interpretive lens of an antivaccination advocate transparent and thereby builds the kinds of important empathy bridges that might see us through a polarized 2017.In this issue, we are launching a feature that we hope may become regular to Reception: a section called “Reading Notes” in which scholars can introduce very briefly the opening salvos of projects recently launched, in-depth treatments of archival materials, or nascent methodological musings. We inaugurate the series with Yung-Hsing Wu's provocative suggestion that the identification of first wave feminist critics with the heroine of Jane Eyre was the condition of possibility for their critical work. In a second piece, Reception coeditor Amy Blair queries the methodological boundaries of reception approaches through a reading advice column in Good Housekeeping magazine and the reader mail received by its author. We are excited about the possibility of including this type of work as a permanent section in future issues of Reception, and to help us decide, we would be very interested in hearing what readers think of it. Therefore, please send your reactions and ideas to either James Machor or Amy Blair at their email addresses listed under “Submission Information” on the page following the table of contents.Following this new feature is our regular section devoted to reviews of important new books in reception studies, covering diverse areas of research and scholarship. For reception studies within cultural and mass-media studies, readers can turn to Daniel Cavicchi's review of My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by Lisa Gilman, and Lucas Dietrich's review of Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood by Miriam J. Petty. Those interested in reception studies of literature will find ready fare in Cecilia Konchar Farr's The “Ulysses” Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit reviewed by Barbara Ryan; Vivian R. Pollak's Our Emily Dickinson: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference reviewed by Charlotte Templin; and Tracy Wuster's Mark Twain, American Humorist reviewed, in a second contribution to this issue, by Philip Goldstein. For a crossover work in literary and classical reception studies, readers are directed to Ika Willis' brief review essay of three books: Seth L. Schein's Homeric Epic and its Reception: Interpretive Essays; Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a Scholarly Genre edited by Christina Kraus and Christopher Stray; and Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception edited by Shane Butler. As Willis notes, these books also raise some intriguing questions involving reception theory and methodology, and that interest is shared by the essays in Plotting the Reading Experience: Theory, Practice, Politics, edited by Paulette Rothbauer, Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad, Lynne E. F. McKechnie, and Knut Oterholm, and reviewed by Patsy Schweickart. Oher reviews cover books that cross over at least two areas of reception study. For literary and cultural studies of reception, see James Vechinski's review of Bigger Than “Ben-Hur”: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences edited by Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir. Literary studies and book history come together in Susan M. Ryan's The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace reviewed by Kevin J. Hayes, while the history of reading and cultural studies intersect in Tamara Bhalla's Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community reviewed by Janet Badia.Additional news about scholarship in audience and reception studies can be found in this issue's bibliography of other new books in the field that have appeared in the last eighteen months. The editors would also like to take a moment to acknowledge the fact-checking work of Sarah Bublitz, who assisted in preparing this issue for press.As we at the journal and our sponsoring organization look forward to the future, we want to draw our readers' attention to two upcoming developments. First of all, we invite readers to join us at the Reception Study Society's seventh biennial conference, which will take place September 21–23, 2017, at St. Catherine University and downtown St. Paul, MN, under the direction of Cecilia Konchar Farr. We hope to meet or once again see many of you there.Finally, we are pleased to announce that the next special-topic issue of Reception is planned for the 2018 volume year. Focusing on “Crossing the Boundaries of Reception,” the issue will be guest edited by Steven A. Carr and Janet L. Badia from Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. In the meantime, readers are encouraged to submit their reception-study essays in any scholarly and critical area for consideration for publication in future open-topic issues of Reception.