Reception by Ika Willis

Abstract

MLR, .,   become recognizable as different but interchangeable expressions of the same basic ‘character’. Kunin’s overall argument is easy to follow and to agree with, although it is a shame that he never explains precisely what makes them interchangeable. Rather, he merely invites—or even asserts—our assent: as he puts it a little later, ‘Strange as it may sound, you already agree with me’ (p. ). Elsewhere he turns his attention away from ‘what readers do with characters’ and towards ‘what other characters do with them’ (p. ), or ‘ways in which characters are meaningful to other characters’ (p. ). Indeed, some of Kunin’s most interesting reflections centre on how notions of character (and other ideas that supposedly belong only to literary-critical metadiscourses) appear and circulate within fictional worlds: how Bridget Jones fails to recognize herself as an avatar of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, for example, or how Wilde’s characters explicitly relate their own lives to generic terms such as comedy and (especially) tragedy. at said, the ease with which he slips between discussing the ‘fictional’ and ‘real’ worlds can wrong-foot the reader—for example, when he uses himself as evidence to support his (rather debatable) claim that, within Aristotle’s poetic theory, ‘a person is never a unity’ (p. ). is book will not be for everyone, but its ability to combine moments of thoughtful close reading with a vast and eclectic corpus is impressive; perhaps its most useful and intriguing contribution is the notion that ideas of ‘character’ not only permeate and shape our engagement with fictional people but also underpin their engagements with each other. R H, U  L J H Reception. By I W. Abingdon: Routledge. .  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is book, published in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series, convincingly argues that all studies of literary—or even more broadly, cultural—texts need to be informed by the perspective of reception. In this way, Ika Willis presents reception as an essential ingredient of every interpretation, rather than a separate field of enquiry. For her, reception is coterminous with reading: indeed, she uses the terms ‘reception’ and ‘reading’ almost interchangeably, and ultimately prefers the former because it is more capacious and does not privilege literature over other branches of art. e main strength of Willis’s study lies in her powerful demonstration that reading and readers have been investigated for decades in various quarters of literary studies and related disciplines, even if few connections have so far been made between these different branches of scholarship, ranging from biblical studies and classics to cultural studies and book history. Willis—a professor of English in Australia , who first studied classics in Britain and is also well versed in cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies—is the first scholar to capture clearly and systematically the complex, multifarious field of academic engagement with reading, and show how all the available approaches to it are deeply interrelated . Another welcome consequence of the author’s interdisciplinary expertise is that she effortlessly employs a pleasingly diverse range of examples and case studies  Reviews to support her argument, from Seneca to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to Montaigne to Aboriginal writing, and more. Willis’s starting point is the observation that reception is usually studied only in part, but that we will not be able to understand the activity of reading fully unless we relate all these disparate parts to each other. With this goal in mind, she ‘reorganize[s] the field [of reception] around its central problems and questions’ (p. ), which she groups under four categories: ‘meaning’, ‘reading’, ‘readers’, and ‘rewriting’. us, she argues that ‘all acts of reception are forms of interpretation, conditioned by historically and culturally specific systems of reading, learned and practised by individual readers in complex relations to other readers and producing a specific interpretation or reading which is most visible in the form of a new text’ (pp. –). Willis’s categories move from the abstract to the concrete. Under the category of ‘meaning’, she discusses ‘broad conceptual and theoretical questions about the nature of meaning, language, sign systems and interpretations, questions which underpin all literary study and textual analysis’ (pp. –). In...