Common Reader Research Articles

Theology for Non-Believers

There are many ways of reading a book of the book. One could take a look at the table of content, read a few pages and skip the rest; one could look for the main line of reasoning not bothering about details; one could read carefully from cover to cover (this does not happen to often); and one could not only to read everything, and also to ponder over the argument (this is rather exceptional) but even to enter into discussion with the author. Such readers should be precious to every author. I had a happy chance to have at least one such reader on whose critical remarks I now want to comment. After politely praising my book, professor Burdzy carefully classified his remarks into four groups: errors, omissions, misleading information, and discussion. Errors (happily enough, only a few have been found) are not to be discussed with but corrected. I readily admit omissions; at least in some cases they could be called selection effects. As far as misleading material is concerned, I should say that to mislead the specialist is not the same as to mislead a common reader. In such a subtle matter as probability calculus many things depend on interpretation and interpretations are usually manifold. My account of interpretative questions related to probability are based on standard monographs and textbooks in the field (they are quoted in the book). It is a pity that, when working on the book, I did not know the book by professor Burdzy; if I did, perhaps my presentation of subjective interpretation would have been different. And finally, discussion…, I am open for it. A book that not excite discussion is a failed book.

View from the Sickroom: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Writing Women's Lives of Illness

The focus here is the letters and unpublished journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, concentrating on the period of her first serious illness, situated next to Virginia Woolf's attempts at pathography. Under consideration is a selection of Woolf's diaries; her essay ‘On Being Ill’; her biographical-critical essay on Dorothy Wordsworth published in the second Common Reader in 1932; and her ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Flush, published in 1933. In selecting certain women to write about during the late 1920s/early 1930s, Woolf is extending her project of rethinking and retheorising life writing, particularly in the context of her interest in the subjectivity of illness. At stake is the question of how the lines of a writing life are shaped by illness; how writing renders a transgressive space beyond the ‘normal’ rhythms of life in which to work through a subject's altered relation to her mind and body; and the ways writing can be restorative for a subject grappling with how she has been othered within the context of her most intimate relationships and everyday life.

Hermeneutika Qur’âni dan Perbedaan Pemahaman dalam Menafsirkan al-Qur’ân

To interpret al-Qur’ân means to understand the hidden meaning of this revealed text. This is the essence of hermeneutics. It is about unearthing the implicit truth and making it explicit. Hermeneutics is also a method to read the symbols otherwise not known by the common readers. This method is not only concerned with the literal understanding of the text, but also with the contextual and rational meaning of it by taking into account the horizons around which the text is produced. By horizon it is meant, the nature of the text, the mind and logic of the author and the universe of the reader. This paper deals with the idea of what we call the Qur’ânic hermeneutics. By that we mean the method that has been developed by the competent scholars of the Qur’ânic exegesis over time. We assume that the nature of the Qur’ân necessitates that this holy text cannot be interpreted unilaterally, as it were. That the Qur’ân uses the symbolic words and expression makes it open to be inter preted differnently by the different scholars. We are interested in exploring further the nature of this Qur’ânic hermeneutics and the various outcomes produced by it.

BETH PALMER and ADELENE BUCKLAND (eds), A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900

BETH PALMER and ADELENE BUCKLAND (eds), A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900

Playing with Form: Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz

Possessed, the novel written by Witold Gombrowicz, like a piece of grotesque proper, mixes various styles: high and low, neutral and disturbing, sentimental/romantic and prosaic. The author consciously emphasizes particular genre markers in some passages, leading the reader down a specifi c path, just to clash them with passages of a contradictory genre type. A good case in point is the description of the prince’s residence that complies with gothic novel conventions: it is horrifying and accentuates the singularity of the historical place. Possessed, apparently, was not only to be a product for a mass readership, but an experiment binding the features of high and low art, merging various audiences; it lives up to the expectations of the common reader of mass literature, as well as of the reader of a more sophisticated taste; on the one hand, the novel copies the mechanism of mass culture, as described by Eco48, and on the other, it is a frivolous and pleasant entertainment for a highbrow reader. As an experiment, therefore, the novel is a success because of the abovementioned recent theatrical adaptations, as well as its explicit comic effects.

Incompatible Reading Cultures: Czech Common Readers and the Soviet Mass Reader Concept in the Early 1950s

This article explores how, in the implementation of the Soviet mass reader concept in the early 1950s, the Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia strove to reeducate Czech common readers by prescribing particular texts and particular ways of reading. Focusing predominantly on normative discourse, the article argues that the implementation process was, if not directly doomed to fail, at least to encounter serious obstacles as it suspended inherited cultural and social contexts which were important preconditions for making sense of texts. Contrasting features of a Czech reading culture with those of Soviet mass reading practices, notably the concept of the “readers’ discussion”, this article highlights the distinctive controversies inherent in the cultural construction of the Soviet bloc that challenge the Soviet bloc’s seemingly unified identity.

A few notes on the contemporary common reader

In my paper I attempt to establish a starting point for a critique of the idea of the „common reader” as it is used in contemporary literary criticism. The „common reader” was famously developed as a separate theoretical construct by Samuel Johnson and popularized by Virginia Woolf. Today, this idea is being further popularized and simplified – though largely unconsciously – by both literary critics and mainstream journalists as a means of erasing the possibility of a genuine political conflict/debate. The „common reader” is perceived as a reader without a class, identity or any social background. I argue that in order to undertake a credible and deliberate critique of the „common reader” one has to go beyond the Johnson-Woolf paradigm and into the territory of the so-called everyday life studies – a Situationist-influenced tradition combining culture studies, literary theory and political philosophy.

The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures by Archie L Dick (review)

Reviewed by: The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures by Archie L Dick Rachel Matteau Matsha (bio) Archie L Dick (2013) The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Reading habits are generally difficult to ascertain and study, as the act of reading leaves little tangible trace, if any. In the case of South Africa, the task of studying readers and reading is further aggravated by the complexity and changing face of politically-aligned censorship, and its adverse impacts on reading and readers. Archie L Dick, in his book The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures, aims at shedding light on how, when, where, and what, ordinary readers read in South Africa. Divided into eight chapters, Dick’s work takes us through South African common readers’ hidden histories – hidden because, he reminds us, they were ignored, neglected or obscured. Beginning with an examination of the spread of literacy and ensuing emergence of a reading culture amongst what he terms the Cape colony’s early readers of the 1650s, Dick’s account takes us well into the 1990s, the era marking the end of institutionalised censorship in South Africa. In doing so, Dick builds his argument on a variety of primary sources, including official records, slave wills, readership surveys, interviews, letters, and newspapers. The extensive usage of archival documentation, some of which has never been studied at length before, brings to the fore details on the workings of alternative reading and cultural spaces; connecting the dots between the otherwise fragmented reading cultures hidden behind the political and power struggles punctuating South African history. [End Page 123] A fascinating aspect of Dick’s work is his ability to place the intellectual life of ordinary readers at the centre of his argument, providing previously little known information on the formation of reading communities often marginalised in South African literary historiographies. More or less aligned to the chapter division, these categories of readers include, in Dick’s words, slaves, ‘Free Blacks’, Khoisan, Griquas, women, Second World War troops, political activists, exiles, and political prisoners. The complex sets of relations between these readers, reading modalities and readership formations are examined in detail, highlighting the linkages between reading and broader socio-political affairs. This firmly inscribes Dick’s book within the interdisciplinary tradition of book history scholarship gaining momentum in South Africa. For example, in Chapter 3, Dick shows how early twentieth century white women’s reading groups played a role in nation building as they preached the virtues of the ‘right book’ for building ‘white reading nations’ (67), aligning reading to the broader imperial and colonial project. The book also touches on the subject of censorship during the apartheid era, illustrating how the intellectually repressive climate led to an increased politicisation of reading. Reflecting on the role of state librarians during apartheid, Dick concludes that – with few exceptions – librarians in South Africa generally supported censorship, with some going to the extent of burning and destroying banned books. Not confining his study within South African borders, Dick provides an interesting account of what books were read by South African readers in exile, and how these relate to what was read in South Africa. Using statistics and archives from the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) library as an example, he demonstrates how libraries in exile were used as a tool to support the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa (Chapter 7). Interpreting SOMAFCO’s lending figures to identify reading patterns, Dick also notes that readers in exile read a wide array of publications, including popular lifestyle magazines and Afrikaans literature over and above African literature, Marxist literature and general political books. Dick goes beyond an analysis of each of these reading publics to successfully draw parallels between the groups of common readers identified and their respective reading protocols. In establishing links between the various intellectual circuits, Dick not only points towards a transnational understanding of readership formations and reading practices in South Africa, but also demonstrates some unlikely relationships forged around [End Page 124] books and readings. The agency of readers in the historical period discussed in Dick’s work...

A World Without Cicci: Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, 1940–2016

A World Without Cicci: Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, 1940–2016 Morris Beja Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (Cicci) passed away after a short and sudden illness on 20 March 2016, a little over three years after the death of her beloved husband Marino, whom she had cared for so devotedly ever since he had had a stroke. The loss of Cicci has profoundly moved friends and colleagues all over the globe. Actually, with Cicci there was no distinction between “friend” and “colleague”: everyone who knew her felt close to her. Certainly Ellen Carol Jones and I did, and we have sadly regretted not having been able to take advantage of her frequent invitations to repeat the one visit we made years ago to Marino’s and her lovely home in Bologna, in the center of town right next to the Two Towers; from the top of one of the towers you can look down to their patio, where we had a wonderful meal that she had prepared for us. Cicci was a friend and colleague not solely within the Joyce world. Her academic titles impressively show that: she was the founder—and Dean—of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Language and Culture (Dipartimento di Studi Interdisciplinari su Traduzione, Lingue e Culture) at the University of Bologna-Forli, and, for example (only one example), she served a term on the Executive Board of the Italian Association of English Studies. When Raffaella Baccolini, Delia Chiaro, Chris Rundle, and Sam Whitsitt edited a festschrift in her honor in 2011, they published two volumes, one devoted to Joyce (A Joyceful of Talkatalka from Friendshapes for Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli) and the second, with almost twice as many pages, to a number of her other chief interests, Minding the Gap: Studies in Linguistic and Cultural Exchange. Among those interests was film. When she came to Ohio State to give a lecture, her argument was surprising and even, to me anyway, heretical: that in presenting a film to an audience in a foreign country, dubbing is preferable to subtitles. Cicci was in Ohio as a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati; she also had that role (just to mention institutions in the U.S.) at Stanford University, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Miami. Of course her interests even within just (just?) the Joyce world were, to borrow the title of one of her books, no less myriadminded. She was especially though far from exclusively fascinated by the Wake. Her own essay in the volume she co-edited with Paola Pagliatti and Romana Zacchi, Myriadminded Man: Jottings on Joyce, begins, “Among Joyce’s works Finnegans Wake is the least read and certainly the least understood. Intellectuals, insulted by its difficulty, students, frightened by its obscurity and common readers, incapable of coping [End Page 284] with the peculiarity of its language, all reject it. And yet this text can be the most enjoyable, stimulating, gratifying of literary works.” (“Insulted” is right on.) Cicci’s essay in Karen Lawrence’s volume Transcultural Joyce, “Anna Livia Plurabelle’s Italian Sister,” comes out of her central interest in questions of translation. Specifically, it is about the Italian “translation” of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” that Joyce helped prepare; the quotation marks around “translation” reflect her argument that “although it originated as a ‘translation,’ it became more and more creative along the route, by adopting strategies that one would hardly recommend a translator to follow. More than a (partial) reading of an original, as every translation is for bad and for good, it is the last page of great prose that Joyce left us shortly before dying.” Of course she illuminated Joyce’s other works as well—as in ReJoycing: New Readings of “Dubliners” (1998), the volume she edited with Harold F. Mosher, Jr., which had its origins in the Joyce Symposia in Copenhagen (1986) and Monaco (1990). Cicci loved to attend all kinds of Joyce gatherings. She was one of the founders of the James Joyce Italian Foundation, and was President of the International James Joyce Foundation and a long-time elected member of its Board—and was on that Board when she died. She co-directed the...

China’s Bibliographic Tradition and the History of the Book

This article explores the general disciplinary features of China’s bibliographic norm in relation to modernizing traditional understandings of the Chinese book in historical studies. In comparison with the Anglo-American and French traditions, the Chinese bibliographic norm was scholarly and intellectually oriented to the neglect of the book’s physical features and availability. Chinese bibliographers compiled catalogues not for common readers but for elites, while publishers, printers, booksellers, and trade catalogues were absent from the formation of the Chinese bibliographic tradition. Traditional Chinese studies of the book were subjugated to the bibliographic norm. In considering the book as a tangible object in historical studies, we need an archeology of the book in using traditional bibliographies.

Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: the Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 by Lise Jaillant

Reviewed by: Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: the Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 by Lise Jaillant Hannah McGregor (bio) MODERNISM, MIDDLEBROW AND THE LITERARY CANON: THE MODERN LIBRARY SERIES, 1917-1955, by Lise Jaillant. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014. xii + 211 pp. $99.00. Lise Jaillant’s Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon is an engagingly written and rigorously researched study of the Modern Library, focusing on the role of the quality reprint series in the circulation and popularization of modernist authors throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Jaillant offers convincing evidence, accrued through careful historical and archival research, that the interwar period in the United States was characterized by a blurring of the lines between modernism and the middlebrow, between prestigious classics and popular bestsellers, and between canonical authors and modern celebrities. In this way, Jaillant’s book constitutes a meaningful contribution to the field of middlebrow studies, particularly recent scholarship that has explored the middlebrow as an “amorphous … sphere” that could bring together the high and low in unexpected combinations that appealed to a wider range of cultural consumers.1 Jaillant’s book takes the form of six case studies bracketed by a brief introduction and conclusion, with each study teasing out the role of one more-or-less canonical author in the Modern Library series: H. G. Wells, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner. This approach allows her to be particularly precise in her discussion, aided throughout by graphs and maps that emphasize the studies’ fine attention to detail, of paratext, circulation, advertising, and reception. These case studies are brought together through what Jaillant calls “a forgotten moment in the history of modernism—the moment when ‘high’ modernist texts were sufficiently attractive to be reprinted in a cheap series, but had not yet been dissociated from ‘lesser’ works” (4). Tracing the shift from the early 1920s, when canonical modernists like Joyce and Woolf had become household names in the United States but were not yet widely accessible to common readers, to the post-World War II period, when suspicion of the masses and the emergence of professional literary criticism (especially New Criticism) led to rejection of the Modern Library’s democratizing drive, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon concludes that there was a moment when Joyce and Woolf could be read not only as modern classics but as “exciting and pleasurable” bestsellers (102). The case study of Woolf’s introduction to Mrs Dalloway is the most effective demonstration of how attention to context shifts our understanding of the relation between modernism and the middlebrow.2 Between 1928 and 1948, the Modern Library printed an edition of Mrs Dalloway accompanied by an introduction written by Woolf— [End Page 227] an introduction distinctly at odds with the perception of Woolf as a highbrow writer with well-documented disdain for the middlebrow.3 As Jaillant explains, the “Battle of the Brows” Woolf fought in England was a culturally specific debate shaped by the gender and class dynamics of the emerging literary profession in the United Kingdom (97). A similar debate certainly played out in the United States, but across different timelines;4 Jaillant argues that, in the 1920s, “American intellectuals did not share the same kind of anxieties over the ‘brows’” and “were content with the development of a vast middlebrow sphere, with less distinct ‘high’ and ‘low’” (97). The Modern Library’s focus on blurring distinctions between high and low modernist texts gave Woolf access to a wider and more diverse readership, which allowed her to explore her interest in amateur literary criticism. While Mrs Dalloway never stopped selling well for the Modern Library, the reception of modernism had shifted by the 1940s. The study of authors like Woolf became “institutionalized in English departments,” and modernism itself “came to be seen as a difficult movement for an elite” (102). It is only with the recent advent of the New Modernist Studies, Jaillant asserts, that the understanding of modernist literature as elite, aesthetically difficult, and reserved for professional readers has been challenged. Joyce was similarly popularized for an American audience via his inclusion in the Modern Library series. When A Portrait of the Artist as a...

Short literary forms

This paper presents theoretical review of forms of oral literature which are, in previous studies, neglected the most. Even though their roots spread all the way to the ancient times, these forms continue to live through direct communication, in which they have found a constant place, and through written literature, where they can be found very often. There is no one universally agreed term for this kind of literary forms so many literary theorists tend to call them 'short literary forms', while others tend to call them 'simple forms', and some, also, 'short figures of speech'. The length of these forms varies from one sentence, in which they can be presented, to short poetic forms, and all the way to long poetic forms in which some individual themes form causal relationship. This paper encompasses various types of short literary forms which are, out of all forms of this type, most familiar to common reader. Every type included in this paper is illustrated with an example from oral literature, and, where characteristically, from written literature.

„Nie może pozostawać duch mój w człowieku na zawsze” (Rdz 6,3). Długość ludzkiego życia na podstawie genealogii w Rdz 1–11

The Genealogies in the Book of Genesis present a challenge not only for common readers of the Holy Scripture but also for biblical scholars. For the former ones, their monotony slows down or even interrupts the flow of narration; for the latter ones, the genealogies’ monotonous rhythm can be a code to a theological enigma hidden in the holy text. One of the riddles in the genealogies of the Book of Genesis seems to be the shortening of human longevity between Gen 5 and Gen 11. Instead of looking for the causes of this process in human sinfulness or in human drifting apart from the garden of Eden, the author perceives this change as a result of God’s decision expressed in Gen 6:3.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

Seymour Krim’s Courage

Seymour Krim’s Courage Richard Kostelanetz (bio) Mark Cohen, ed., Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010. 275 275 Pages, Cloth, $29.95. I wanted Flaubertian sainthood, poverty be thou the bride, a religious quest in prose where Art was God and I pursued it like a driven priest. —Seymour Krim, “Norman Mailer” (1969) I recall Seymour Krim (1922–1989) as one of the most courageous writers I’ve ever known. He chose subjects that intimidated lesser writers, such as his own madness in “The Insanity Bit,” his failures, his envy of writers who were more successful (not just with publishers but with women, such as Norman Mailer, born a year later), and foul relationships with publishers. He wrote the sort of essay that editors haggle and bite their nails over, knowing that it should be published but identifying excuses for why they can’t. Simply by going where few went before, by exposing problems previously hidden from readers, Krim epitomized what was called The New Journalism a few decades ago. He influenced select successors, including me. Krim exhibited courage in his prose style, too, transcending the traditional notion that every sentence should be limited to one clear idea. Instead, a classic Krim sentence includes parentheses and asides too long to quote here. He also used familiar words in original ways: “I had a good chance of getting planked one night about three weeks ago, I was looking forward to it [End Page 175] because the girl was dark-eyed, salty and keen, quick to judge and glaring in opinion but this seemed merely to open up wide the potential excitement of rocketing with her.” My hunch is that Krim worked up his extended sentences and comparably inflated paragraphs, adding and changing, to give them a signature uniquely his. Because he wrote not for specialist academics but for people as intelligent as himself, he also was expanding laudably the editorial container of what the “common reader” might commonly read. Even in writing ostensibly about others, he often spoke about himself (as do I, sometimes). Although Missing a Beat lacks “The Insanity Bit,” it does include highly personal portraits of his colleagues Harold Rosenberg, Mario Puzo, Milton Klonsky, Mailer, and Dr. Joyce Brothers (whom he despised), four essays on black culture and Jews, four more on Jews (including, in Krim’s imagined posthumous conversion, Henry Miller!), and the classic autobiographical “What’s This Cat’s Story?” The range of Krim’s concerns was more obsessive than wide. In the end, he was a more exemplary “New York Jewish intellectual” than the arbiters who marginalized him. Needless to say, the Seymour Krim I knew in the 1980s was deferential and considerate, perhaps to a fault. He was, I’m told, a good teacher unable to score a permanent position. His overwrought sentences created the semblance of tough, unforgiving hysteria I did not find in the man. In person, before me, he seemed easily pushed around, perhaps the victim of too much misfortune, not to mention strong women and too many bullying editors. (The truth implicit in this book’s numerous “Acknowledgments” is that a courageous writer’s work necessarily appears initially in many places.) He spent the 1980s working up an epic tentatively titled “Chaos” that was never published. Life wore him down, alas. I remain surprised that he never discussed his relationship to another Krim, Arthur (1910–1994), whom he identified to me as a prominent relative he could call upon. Oddly, a Google search of their names together (“X” + “Y”) identifies Arthur only as one of Seymour’s many correspondents. Arthur, don’t forget, was a film mogul and, incidentally, finance chairman for the Democratic Party. Arthur’s widow, Mathilde (born 1926), gained certain fame in the late 1990s as a publicist for AIDS awareness. My hunch decades ago identified Arthur as Seymour’s secret patron, the supportive relative that every courageous (especially Jewish) writer needs. An obituary for Donald [End Page 176] Krim (1945–2011), the founder of Kino International, a quality film distributor, reveals that this Krim got his first film job...

Interpretation of Transferred Epithet by Means of Conceptual Integration Theory

Transferred epithet is one of the figures of speech frequently used in our expression. A better understanding of this seemingly illogical modification is undoubtedly of great benefit for common readers. In this paper, the conceptual integration theory advanced by Fauconnier and Turner (1994, 1997) is applied to the interpretation of transferred epithet. The purpose is to test the effectiveness of the blending framework, and this study is also expected to come up new insights to widen the wealth of data that is necessary to verify the generality of conceptual integration.

Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series

Canonical in the 1930s:Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series Lise Jaillant (bio) In 1931, the Modern Library series reprinted Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and sold it for only ninety-five cents.1 For Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the young owners of the Modern Library, this was a victory after years of unsuccessful attempts to include Cather titles in their series. However, Archbishop stayed only five years in the Modern Library. At Cather’s insistence, Alfred Knopf, the original publisher, refused to renew the contract, and Cerf and Klopfer had to drop the novel from their list. While Sharon O’Brien has argued that “Willa Cather possessed canonical status during the 1920s only to lose it in the 1930s” (111), my essay contends that some of Cather’s works became canonical in the early 1930s—when these texts were included in cheap series of reprints such as the Modern Library and Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Library, and marketed to a large audience of students and their professors. As John Guillory puts it, “canonicity is a function of the reproduction of a work over time, and the market for such reproduction is the school” (53 n5). The canonicity of Archbishop and other Cather titles was indeed the product of the education system (the principal canon maker for Guillory) but also of reprint series, which made these titles easily available to the school market. At the time when the study of American literature was being institutionalized in universities, many instructors selected the inexpensive editions of Cather titles for classroom use. Cather’s opposition to such dissemination of her fiction had long-term consequences: as she was increasingly attacked by a new generation of Marxist critics, Cather made little attempt to reach the academics that continued to admire her work. She was competing with other American writers whose novels were easily available in the Modern Library and other cheap series, and yet, she underestimated the importance of these series in canon making.2 [End Page 476] The Modern Library series can be seen as a middlebrow enterprise that, in Trysh Travis’s words, “offered to mediate literary culture for modern audiences in need of guidance” (340).3 When Albert Boni and Horace Liveright launched the series in New York in 1917, they targeted the growing number of readers interested in contemporary literature. The first list of the Modern Library included H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica and War in the Air, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Guy de Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi, and plays by Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg. Unlike Everyman’s Library and other cheap publisher’s series that specialized in out-of-copyright works, the Modern Library reprinted not only older classics but also recent, copyrighted texts. Consumers were encouraged to buy the Modern Library to increase their confidence and social status. One of the first advertisements for Boni and Liveright’s series proclaimed: “The ‘Modern Library’ appeals to people who consider good books a necessity, not a luxury. People are judged by the books they read” (“The Modern Library of the World’s Best Books,” original emphasis). Readers were promised that “the world’s best books” would shape their taste and their personality. In short, advertisements for the Modern Library revealed the main characteristics of the new middlebrow ethos: the emphasis on education, the ideal of self-improvement, and the explicit link between culture and social success. Although Willa Cather has traditionally been seen as an elite writer who preferred “fewer readers and better readers” (WC to Greenslet, 31 Oct. 1932), recent scholarship has illuminated her involvement with a commercialized middlebrow culture. As Melissa Homestead points out, Cather “quietly exploited middlebrow institutions, such as book clubs and mass-circulation women’s magazines, as a way to reach and engage the common reader” (78). Mark Madigan has shown that the Book-of-the-Month Club chose two of her books as main selections (Shadows on the Rock in 1931, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl in 1940), and recommended many of her titles as alternative choices for members who declined the main selection (72-79). In 1927, Death Comes...

The Tet Offensive and the Battle of Khe Sahn as a Watershed of the Vietnam War: Michael Herr's Dispatches

The literature of war, independently of genre, tends to record the causes of the conflict, which are generally political and economic. But, it also tends to appoint a kind of aesthetics of reception, in other words, how the conflict is felt and registered by the experiences of the individual, whether soldier, writer, journalist or common reader. In Dispatches, the fantasies of the grunts, the allusions to the theory of dominoes, the necessity to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, and the role of the press are condensed in this remarkable non-fictional narrative.

The Chekhovian Point of View in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Although Virginia Woolf’s critical writings pay special tribute to Anton Chekhov’s stories and plays, his role as preceptor in relation to her own fiction has not been fully explored. Not only does the manuscript of To the Lighthouse display clear affinities with Chekhov’s sensibility (as apprehended in Woolf’s 1925 Common Reader essay, “The Russian Point of View”), but this congruence was intensified during extensive final revisions, begun in typescript just after Woolf had viewed a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in late October 1925. Woolf’s purposeful assimilation of Chekhov’s inconclusive, disjunctive manner in her meticulously composed, autobiographically candid novel bespeaks an unapologetic openness to authorial influence, made all the more provocative by the adoption of a foreign model whose merit was then still little recognized in English literary circles.

Samuel Johnson: the arc of the pendulum

1. Introduction 2. Johnson and Time 3. Johnson and Change 4. Johnson's Assertions and Concessions: Moral Irresolution and Rhetorical Performance 5. Johnson: Sanity and Syntax 6. Johnson's Freud 7. Fault finding in Johnson's Lives of the Poets 8. Johnson and Genius 9. Johnson Personified 10. The Creation of Character 11. 'Goose-quill or Ganders?': Female writers in Johnson's Dictionary? 12. The Battle of the Word-Books: Competition, the Common Reader, and Johnson's Dictionary 13. Fixity and Instability in the Text of Johnson's Poems 14. What is it about Johnson? 15. Johnson and the Warton Brothers 16. Johnson Rebalanced: The Happy Man, The Supportive Family, and his Social Religion