Gender Dynamics and Critical Reception: A Study of Early 20th-century Book Reviews from The New York Times

Matthew J Lavin

doi:10.22148/001c.11831

Abstract

This paper focuses on book reviews at the turn-of-the century United States in order to underline fundamental compatibilities between large-scale, computational methods and book historical approaches. It analyzes a dataset of approximately 2,800 book reviews published in The New York Times between January 1, 1905 and December 31, 1925. Several machine learning scenarios are employed to investigate how the underlying reviews constructed gendered norms for reading and readership. Logistic regression models are trained and tested to evaluate how effectively lemma frequencies predict the perceived or presumed gender of an author under review. The paper discusses four different feature selection scenarios, as follows: (1) No terms removed, (2) Stop words removed, (3) Stop words, gender nouns, and titles removed, and (4) Stop words, gender nouns, titles, and common forenames removed. For each scenario, the top lemma coefficients are discussed and interpreted. Tracing the norms (gendered and gendering) of The New York Times Book Review in the early twentieth century demonstrates that even the summary-driven book reviews played an important role in mediating hierarchies of taste and distinction. Further, the paper seeks to demonstrate that cultural analytics methods can be used to investigate a range of research questions related to authorship, publishing, circulation, and reception.

Highlights

In addition to speaking to some of the preoccupations of periodical studies, my research question—how did New York Times book reviews between 1905 and 1925 describe published work in relation to perceived gender lines—revisits three dominant preoccupations of previous scholarship on readership at the beginning of the twentieth century: the exchange of economic and symbolic capital in a “field of cultural production”; the disruption of cultural hierarchy in the construction of early 20th-century taste; and the historical feminization of particular cultural ideals.[16]
Radway’s primary concern is whether cultural spaces between high and low were permissible, and how the “values associated with one form of cultural production were wed to forms and values usually connected with another.”[20]. She argues that a preponderance of “how-and-what-to-read literature” in the late nineteenth century argued the virtues of “reading as a goal-directed activity” and positioned itself against cheap fiction, as well as “the sensual, somatic pleasures of the body” associated with reading for enjoyment.[21]
The “scandal of middlebrow,” Radway writes, “was a function of its failure to maintain the fences of cordoning off culture from commerce.”[22] her work does not engage directly with the book review as a form, it remains one of the most important and often cited touchstones on the idea of middlebrow, as well as the pre-1925 logic of reading that no doubt influenced The New York Times Book Review at the start of the twentieth century

Summary

Introduction

In addition to speaking to some of the preoccupations of periodical studies, my research question—how did New York Times book reviews between 1905 and 1925 describe published work in relation to perceived gender lines—revisits three dominant preoccupations of previous scholarship on readership at the beginning of the twentieth century: the exchange of economic and symbolic capital in a “field of cultural production”; the disruption of cultural hierarchy in the construction of early 20th-century taste; and the historical feminization of particular cultural ideals.[16]. In contrast, is directly concerned with the function of book reviews in the early 20th-century United States In this sense, Rubin’s work contributes to a larger body of scholarship predating “distant reading” that studies book reviews quantitatively or systematically.[23] Rubin describes middlebrow as a series of cultural mechanisms by which genteel values of the nineteenth century “survived and prospered, albeit in chastened and redirected form, throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.”24 According to Rubin, the “news” approach to book reviews was “virtually the only mode of presentation in the daily press during the antebellum period.”[25] These reviewers tended to allocate as much if not more column inches to book summaries as they did to their evaluations. Book reviews’ primary exigencies—summarization and evaluation of published work— represented an enticing space for many competing cultural principles to interact

Methods

Results

Conclusion